jcp@osiris.UUCP (Jody Patilla) (05/14/85)
Dear Douglanessa, (With an opportunity like that I just couldn't resist ! :-) Actually, you've made a number of self-references which made it fairly clear that you're male (or at least think you are !). But anyway, about Kate Bush. We have all but one of her albums, including the American compilation (which is what I was thinking of as a more recent album than "The Dreaming", primarily because several cuts are re-mixed in a way as to greatly change their sound). I am not terribly impressed by any of them. My impression of alot of her stuff is that it sounds as if she just found this great new toy, the Fairlight CMI, and she's just bound and determined to make every kind of strange noise she possibly can with it. This often results in music that is either mechanistic or coy. Not that i have anything against strange noises or whatever (I like Harry Partch for example, and you don't find much stranger noises than his); my complaint does not have to do with her *type* of music, but what she does with it. I suppose a good test would be to see what she could come up with if she were forced to rely only on acoustic instruments and no fancy engineering in the studio. Also, as an aside, I noticed your list of groups and people she says have influenced her. There are some name corrections necessary here - Everheart Faber is Eberhard Faber, Bossie Band is Bothy Band, and Jove and the Polar Bears are Jules and the Polar Bears (Jules is Jules Shear). (there may have been others but I didn't notice) Yes, a number of the names she gives are Irish or English folk groups or individual musicians (such as Alan Stivell, the harpist, etc). Bush is (or was a couple of years ago) a big rage in England, but has never been terribly popular here, except among a small group. I've nevr cared for her music, and I'm not trying to piss anyone off ! (well, ok, maybe some Andreas Vollenwieder fans :-)) Actually, I did receive a number of letters from folks who supported my plea for more and different music in this news group (which was the real point of my original note, and Kate Bush was totally ancillary to that). I also received several replies that had headers but no innards, so if someone out there is waiting for me to write back and I haven't, it's probably because yours was a non-message. Let's talk more about blues or something.......... -- jcpatilla "'Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill !'"
jer@peora.UUCP (J. Eric Roskos) (05/17/85)
> My impression of alot of her stuff is that it sounds as if she just found > this great new toy, the Fairlight CMI, and she's just bound and determined > to make every kind of strange noise she possibly can with it. This reminds me of a question that has been bothering me for a long time. Back when the Apple* Macintosh** personal computer first came out, there was a demo disk distributed to various dealers, etc., of a voice synthesis program [it's the one that had different names over the early part of the product life, names like MacinTalk, MacTalk, etc., and I don't know the name it has now or had then]. Included with it was a little demo that recited the well-known "In the olden days, before 1984, not many people used computers, and for a very good reason: not many knew how, and..." story. Well, if you looked in the text file that contained the text of this message, there was a delimiting string at the end of the message, something like "#####", and then some more phonetic text. If you took out the "####", after it got through telling you about Apple, it would start giving you a little talk about how the Fairlight CMI*** worked! Why is this? Was that voice synthesizer made by the same people who make the CMI? Or is there a version of it that runs on the CMI? or what? * Apple is a trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. ** Macintosh is a trademark licensed to Apple Computer, Inc. ***Fairlight and CMI are trademarks of Fairlight Instruments [I think] -- Full-Name: J. Eric Roskos UUCP: ..!{decvax,ucbvax,ihnp4}!vax135!petsd!peora!jer US Mail: MS 795; Perkin-Elmer SDC; 2486 Sand Lake Road, Orlando, FL 32809-7642 Gel guvf nznmvat rkcrevzrag! Gnxr n znfxvat gncr ebyy vagb n qnex ebbz. Jnvg sbe lbhe rlrf gb nqwhfg. Chyy bss fbzr bs gur znfxvat gncr. Jngpu pybfryl juvyr qbvat fb.
gus@Shasta.ARPA (05/20/85)
> This reminds me of a question that has been bothering me for a long time. > Back when the Apple* Macintosh** personal computer first came out, there > was a demo disk distributed to various dealers, etc., of a voice synthesis > program [it's the one that had different names over the early part of the > product life, names like MacinTalk, MacTalk, etc., and I don't know the > name it has now or had then]. Included with it was a little demo that > recited the well-known "In the olden days, before 1984, not many people > used computers, and for a very good reason: not many knew how, and..." > story. The name of the program was indeed Macintalk. It fell into obscurity after last spring when it first released, was re-released (with better sound) in December to a few developers, including myself, and is now on the verge of falling into obscurity again. I really hope that Apple finally finishes off the contract work on this thing and releases it completely. Macintalk was written by the same people who wrote SAM (Software Automated Mouth) for the Atari and Apple II. They were commissioned early on by Apple to do a Mac port, and it appeared in the original Mac demo in January, '84 (on a 512K Mac!) Over the past year, I have been able to collect bits and pieces of old Macintalk junk including the Mac/Fairlight script mentioned earlier. The New (December '84) Macintalk sound a lot better. It sounds like a a computer in its mid 30's rather than an old man who's false teeth are out for repair. I had the opportunity to do a fair amount of Macintalk hacking this winter when I wrote ShuttleClock, a timeline reminder clock to remind experimenters on the ground of various events occurring in Spacelab 2 to go up in the Space shuttle this summer. There are two modules - Macintalk and Reciter. Macintalk goes phoneme to speech, and Reciter goes from text to phonemes. Since I had to do text to speech, and the timelines I was reading had a lot of strange vocabulary, I had to disassemble the entire reciter code in order to get at the text- to-phoneme rules table. (They promised to have this available in the next release, but I couldn't wait...) I found that I had to do a lot of tuning to get words to sound right, and I added a lot more words than I thought I would have to, but the result is a very nice sounding program which, I hope, will do its job well.
nessus@mit-eddie.UUCP (Doug Alan) (06/14/85)
["I wanna be Jackie Onasis -- I wanna wear a pair of dark sunglasses"] > [From: jcp@osiris.UUCP (Jody Patilla)] > Dear Douglanessa, > > (With an opportunity like that I just couldn't resist ! :-) > > Actually, you've made a number of self-references which made it > fairly clear that you're male (or at least think you are !). Have I? I don't recall doing such a thing. Are you sure you just aren't being sexist? > But anyway, about Kate Bush. We have all but one of her albums, > including the American compilation (which is what I was thinking of > as a more recent album than "The Dreaming", primarily because > several cuts are re-mixed in a way as to greatly change their > sound). I don't think it fair at all to call the "Kate Bush" EP a more recent Kate Bush album, since Kate Bush had nothing to do with it. Also, *everything* on the EP *was* previously available. The only songs that are different from the album versions of the songs are "James And The Cold Gun", which appeared on the "Kate Bush On Stage" live EP, and "Un Baiser D'Enfant" which appeared as the B-side of the "Ne T'Enfuis Pas" single. ("Ne T'Enfuis Pas" is of "The Dreaming" period, but was probably left off of the album because it's too commercial to fit in with "The Dreaming".) > I am not terribly impressed by any of them. My impression of alot of > her stuff is that it sounds as if she just found this great new toy, > the Fairlight CMI, and she's just bound and determined to make every > kind of strange noise she possibly can with it. The only album you can be talking about is "The Dreaming", because that is the only album where she does anything really strange with sounds and the only album where she plays a Fairlight. Her previous albums (especially "The Kick Inside" and "Lionheart") are all much more 'normal' in their instrumentation. You sound a lot more like your describing Jean-Michel Jarre's new album "Zoolook" or Laurie Anderson (though she plays a Synclavier -- and both these people are excellent) because Kate Bush really doesn't use her Fairlight to make very strange sounds. She uses the presets on the Fairlight and uses it to sample sound effects (like the the bird flapping at the end of the song "The Dreaming"). To my ear, normal accoustic piano (and of course voice) is the most prominent instrument on "The Dreaming". One of the strangest sounding songs on the album "Pull Out The Pin" has no synthesizer or Fairlight in it at all. The weird sounds on "The Dreaming" were created with strange accoustic instruments like the digeridu, Kate and others doing strange things with their voices, tapes of sounds heard around. Most of the other weird sounds were created by putting voice, guitar, etc., through harmonizers, flangers, compressors, delays, etc. But these are hardly new toys -- people have been using them since the sixties. In any case, Kate Bush was not just trying to make every kind of weird noise she could -- she wasn't just playing with new toys. She puts a lot of effort into making the sounds complement perfectly the mood of the music and the words. I think she's done a flawless job. In my opinion, the sounds used in making music are just as important as any other component of the music. Some of the music I like (this doesn't describe anything by Kate Bush) doesn't even contain anything you could really call a melody or rhythm or harmony. Some of it is just a sequence of sounds. I don't think it fair of you to criticize Kate Bush for trying to do something artistic with the sounds used in the music. Now, as I perceive it, on "The Dreaming" the music and the arrangement of the different sounds, not the sounds themselves, are what is really strange. Strange and wonderful. I admit that on the first or second listen, it is very difficult to assimilate the music completely and understand it, since it is so strange and so much is going on. Thus, because on the first couple listenings, the music is somewhat inaccessible, what leaves the biggest impression is the strangeness of the sounds. I think that if you give it some more listens, you will find that the music is indeed exceedingly interesting and the strange sounds perfectly complement the strange music. > This often results in music that is either mechanistic or coy. Not > that i have anything against strange noises or whatever (I like > Harry Partch for example, and you don't find much stranger noises > than his); my complaint does not have to do with her *type* of > music, but what she does with it. I have nothing against music that sounds mechanistic (in limited doses). Kraftwerk, etc., are great. But I beg to differ about anything on any Kate Bush album sounding mechanistic. Kate Bush doesn't even like normal synthesizers any more because she doesn't like mechanistic sounding music. "I must admit I'm now much less interested in synthesizers, especially since the Fairlight CMI. I just find a lot of the sounds that perhaps before were interesting a little too machine-like. What attracts me to the Fairlight is its ability to create very human, animal, emotional sounds that don't actually sound like a machine. I think in a way that's what I've been waiting for." -- Kate Bush About the music sounding "coy" (i.e. "affectedly shy"?). I'm not sure what you mean by this. Shy? Kate Bush may be shy, but in her music she pours her heart out. Affected? I feel nothing but deep honesty from all of her music. Kate Bush is just weird down to the core. > I suppose a good test would be to see what she could come up with if > she were forced to rely only on acoustic instruments and no fancy > engineering in the studio. Why would that be a good test of anything? Where would Jimmy Hendrix be without feedback? Without fancy studios, we wouldn't have "Sgt. Pepper's", etc. But in any case, Kate Bush would certainly pass the test. All the music for Kate Bush's first two albums was written for just voice and piano. Latter, most of the songs were rearranged by the producer (Kate Bush wasn't yet producing her own albums then) or by her band for more instruments. Most of the songs on her first two albums do not make any fancy use of the studio, effects, or synthesizers. Some songs were left as just voice and piano and others are completely accoustic with other instruments. "Never for Ever" contains a short but wonderful acappella instrumental called "Night Scented Stock". Even on "The Dreaming" there is lots of wonderful accoustic stuff (mixed in with the other stuff). There's lots of normal piano played by Kate Bush. There's wonderful digeridu playing by Rolf Harris on the song "The Dreaming". Planxty (Bill Whelan, Lian O'Flynn, Sean Keane, and Donnal Lunny) do some absolutely amazing stuff with uillean pipes, penny whistle, fiddle, and bouzouki on "Night of the Swallow". The strings in "Houdini" are great. And, of course, Kate Bush's vocals are just wonderfully haunting, processed or unprocessed, throughout the album. > Also, as an aside, I noticed your list of groups and people she says > have influenced her. There are some name corrections necessary here > - Everheart Faber is Eberhard Faber, Bossie Band is Bothy Band ... Thanks for your help here. I do appreciate it. One minor correction to your corrections: Eberhard Faber is Eberhard Weber. He plays bass on "Houdini". > Actually, I did receive a number of letters from folks who supported > my plea for more and different music in this news group (which was > the real point of my original note, and Kate Bush was totally > ancillary to that). I agree, let's talk about all sorts of music (as long as it's not formula dreck)! Was a move to discuss Sade and Madonna supposed to be a move up from discussing Kate Bush and Jethro Tull???? I don't object to your tastes not being such to enjoy Kate Bush, but calling her "mediocre" is highly objectionable and an insult to my sensibilities! > Let's talk more about blues or something.......... Well haven't listened to a whole lot of blues yet. Have gotten a little bit of jazz: I just got "Of Human Feelings" by Ornette Coleman. I like it a lot. Am I on the right track or just following the latest mediocre trend in yuppy music since Andreas Vollenwieder and Windom Hill? Was going to check out Miles Davis, but now that he's doing Empty-V videos complete with computer graphics and is covering songs by Michael Jackson and Cyndi Lauper, I've decided that he's just too trendy for me. I saw Duke Ellington do "Carravan" on Night Flight. It was pretty good. Better yet, let's talk about all kinds of music! Listening right now to "Magnetic Flip" by Birdsongs of the Mesozoic. What a great album! Stravinky's "The Rite of Spring" deserves it's reputation. It's the best piece of music ever written in the classical music genre! (Okay, I know nothing about classical music (and it isn't even classical -- it's "modern") and am unfit to comment, but so what!) Fred Frith is a god! So are Roy Harper and Nash the Slash. And Robyn Hitchcock's album "Black Snake Diamond Role" is the best psychedelic pop since Syd Barrett was in Pink Floyd. The Dukes of Stratosphear are pretty good too. Madonna and Sade along with Steve Perry and others too numerous to mention (just turn on a top-40 station to get a good list) bite the big one! "Don't think it over, it always take you over And sets your spirit dancing" Doug Alan nessus@mit-eddie.UUCP {or ARPA}
ryan@fremen.DEC (Mike Ryan DTN 264-8280 MK01-2/H32) (06/17/85)
---------------------Reply to mail dated 14-JUN-1985 08:57---------------------
>contains a short but wonderful acappella instrumental called "Night
An a cappella instrumental? Is that anything like John Cage's "4:36"?nessus@mit-eddie.UUCP (Doug Alan) (06/18/85)
>> contains a short but wonderful acappella instrumental called "Night >> Scented Stock" > An acappella instrumental? Is that anything like John Cage's "4:36"? Well, I will indeed admit that "acappella instrumental" is an oxymoron, but the piece of music in question contains no lyrics and no other instruments than human voice -- in a sense it it using human voice as the instruments to create an instrumental piece of music, so I think that "acappella instrumental" is a wonderfully descriptive term. What would you rather call it? "Moving stranger, does it really matter? As long as your not afraid to feel" Doug Alan nessus@mit-eddie.UUCP (or ARPA)
ryan@fremen.DEC (Mike Ryan DTN 264-8280 MK01-2/H32) (06/21/85)
---------------------Reply to mail dated 17-JUN-1985 18:05--------------------- >Posted by: decwrl!decvax!genrad!mit-eddie!nessus >>> contains a short but wonderful acappella instrumental called "Night >>> Scented Stock" >> An acappella instrumental? Is that anything like John Cage's "4:36"? >the instruments to create an instrumental piece of music, so I think >that "acappella instrumental" is a wonderfully descriptive term. What >would you rather call it? > Doug Alan All right, I just couldn't resist. It's a good term for something like that, but there was no way we could know what you meant. How about a glossary next time:-)? Mike Ryan ARPA: ryan%fremen.DEC@DECWRL.ARPA UUCP: {decvax,allegra,ihnp4,ucbvax,...}!decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-fremen!ryan When the movie is over and everyone leaves the theatre, the accumulated sound leaves with them. It spreads out across the parking lot to become forever part of the landscape. The film is a gift to the surrounding community. -- D. Byrne