[mod.music.gaffa] spiritus sanKTus in nomine...

Love-Hounds-request@EDDIE.MIT.EDU (04/16/87)

Really-From: Dave Hsu <hsu@eneevax.umd.edu>

I tried to sneak this one in by midnight, but missed by a long shot.
Instead, I've created a hulking monster; sorry, folks.

One Year Ago Today (15 April 1987):
Some fellow with the unlikely userid of IED0DXM appears for the first
time, calling in from the Left Coast, finally demonstrating that yes,
Virginia, there really is a use for BITNET.

>Really-From: hsu%uicsrd.CSRD.UIUC.EDU@a.cs.uiuc.edu (William Tsun-Yuk Hsu)
>
>Nah... I'm more like preternaturally thin with a couple of Controlled
>Bleeding tapes in my pocket :-)

...and slowly from behind the gentle glow of a phosphorescent screen,
the Hounds reveal their true natures...

But will you be at the 9:30 Club on the 30th?  I suppose Urbana-Champaign
IS a bit distant.

It looks as though I, for one, now have a solemn duty to attend, doesn't it?
See y'all there, hof.

Commas, this excessive use thereof, throughout, like it, do you?

>Really-From: elliott@tahoe.unr.edu (Andrew Elliott)
>
>Thanks again. Thanks again for the response on my questions regarding the
>KT 45's.  I soon hope to retrieve a copy from the far reaches of the music
>bins in America.  Also recently someone (I forget who?) mentioned something of
>Suzanne Vega.  Just a question:  Who is she and why should I (if I should)
>I explore her music?  Please fill me in.  Thanks in Advance.
>
>-Andrew Elliott

Who is she?  A guitar-playing balladeer, Suzanne Vega's style is
relatively understated, and she occasionally falls into and out of a
half-spoken, half-sung mode.  Perhaps some L-Her less ineloquant than I
could provide you with a better description.

Should you explore her music?  I think so.  Why?  Because she's good.  Period.

Do we really now have as many Andrews as Marks, Dougs, and Hsus?

>Really-From: IED0DXM%UCLAMVS.BITNET@wiscvm.wisc.edu
  Doug (Which one?  "north" implies |>oug, but see how it's signed...) writes:
>>Come on Andrew, how could you lump No Self Control in with "a couple other
>> tracks"?
>>-Doug-
>You're right, what can he say? "Mea culpa"? No, if he said that
>he'd be referring to himself in the first person...

I was going to say something about my successive bouts of despite, envy,
and ultimately appreciation of IED's ability to balance elements of
clinical evaluation and emotional outbursts of KaTeian fervor, and about
my ongoing battle to keep third-person self-references out of my writing,
but every couple lines, another of the latter sneaks in; Dave will
instead leave these phenomena unmentioned.  Dang, I blew it...

>>From: Dave Hsu <hsu@eneevax.umd.edu>
>>Subject: Re: Big Time CD Maxi-single
>>But the REAL question is: how are you supposed to store this bogus
>>packaging?
>
>IED has the same beef, but has solved the problem re the "Cloudbusting"
>CD by...[lots of photocopying, and some shirtboard]

A practical, if not particularly elegant solution.  The record store threw
in a jewel box with my Big Time CD-EP, and I'm trying to work out a useful
mod to accommodate the sleeve, of which I'm sure we'll see many more.

>>From: hsu%uicsrd.CSRD.UIUC.EDU@a.cs.uiuc.edu (William Tsun-Yuk Hsu)
>>Re: IED's recurrent thought
>>Just for the record, if IED posted that in rec.music.misc, his ass would have
>>been flamed so bad he could bring Lake Titicaca to a boil by sitting in it...

Just thought I'd point out that the altitude and low salinity don't hurt,
either.

>>From: Dave Hsu <hsu@eneevax.umd.edu>
>>-dave, depressed, mulling over a response to IED's observations
>
>Dave, don't be depressed, IED didn't think your comments were bad.
>He disagreed with a couple of them, but they weren't indefensible.

Apologies for somewhat overstating the situation; I'll try not to
flood this forum with the kind of overemotionalized drivel that often
pervades other mailing lists I read (the shadow of hypocrisy hangs
thick in the air about me tonight, methinks).  I didn't mean to imply
true depression (something I don't believe in) so much as that gloomy
atmosphere that accompanies a good deep introspection of the variety I
need more often.  The results of which (not so much a defense as an
attempted clarification) follow.

>>...TD is assuming a substantial lead.  To be sure, its flaws
>>(at least, what I perceive to be flaws) and rough edges, intentional or
>>not, are far more visible than those which might be hiding somewhere in
>>HoL.  And yet again, it tempers, qualifies the intensity of each image.
>
>Has IED understood your point correctly? You're saying that...
>... the imperfections of The Dreaming (always assuming --
>for the sake of argument -- that there ARE any "imperfections", of
>course) actually improve the tracks by somehow dissipating the
>brutal power of the musical ideas to which they are connected? An
>unexpected and highly intriguing idea...

I think that yes, this is the notion I was trying to convey.  A frontal
assault of pure genius, thinly veiled with periodic markings of early
Kate.  The appropriateness of this idea is wide open for discussion;
I'm still toying with it myself.

>>For Powell & Lawson's anticlimactic string arrangement in Houdini,
>>it seems merciful that Kate did not refine the song further.
>
>IED doesn't see the final string passage as anti-climactic. Rather,
>it is a kind of ruminative, contemplative coda. Tragedy superseded
>by regret and nostalgia. It's indispensible.

Odd, that's the reaction I had from the strings' first exposition.
But when the recap goes into a repeat, you feel almost cheated, left
on tenterhooks, hungry and deflated.  Certainly as the piece is now
constructed, it's indispensible; the hypothetical question is, would
an additional verse and perhaps a different ending have ruined the song,
or would it have raised the level of intensity beyond the average L-Her's
threshold of pain?  (Warning: this is a silly, romanticized notion of
mine that just happens to fit all too well into my mental mythology)
I'd like to believe the latter; although Kate admits that of the songs
on _TD_, "Houdini" was the most emotionally demanding to write, she also
claims that singing it was a fairly simple matter of recalling an image,
a sensation of `almost pining for Houdini' (source: KBC Newsletter dated
1983, as quoted in this forum last winter).

Am I beating a dead phantom horse?

>>I don't
>>see how even the most dedicated L-H could withstand it were it polished
>>to the level of Get Out Of My House.
>
>Here you've really lost IED...
>"Get Out Of My House", though packed with an incredible amount of
>information, is relatively less polished than "Houdini".
>(Admittedly, these comparisons are next to meaningless.)

I'm afraid I didn't pick a very appropriate comparison.  There is a
saying among certain computer visionaries that when taken with a truly
brilliant idea, the designer is not driven; rather, he (or she) is
pulled along.  How far they are pulled towards that vision is the
metric by which I measure polish.  But there is always the question,
`just how brilliant a goal IS it?'  While GOoMH (a terrible acronym,
it makes me shudder) does not possess nearly the intensity of Houdini,
at least in the humble opinion of THIS L-H, the picture that it
paints appears to have been conceived in fair detail at a very early
stage.  Its evolution, therefore, produced a song for which further
refinement would have been a waste of effort; it is extremely good as
it was left.  Houdini, in some ways like "The Big Sky", seems to represent
the culmination of a large number of shots at a moving target and with
this in mind, I believe it still has room to grow, even considering the
already great investment of time and energy and the obvious brilliance
of the work that it is.  Is Kate not the great craftsman we know she is?
What if...  Ach, go to the previous paragraph.

>IED detects a general tendency in your comments to
>prefer roughness over refinement; which is pretty clearly the
>opposite of the direction Kate has been going in since Lionheart.
>The difficulty with all these terms is that it is extremely easy
>to confuse a loud, aggressive track for a "rough" or "unrefined"
>one (not that you've been doing that). In fact, though, "The
>Big Sky", for instance, is arguably more "refined", from a musical
>and production standpoint, than anything else on side one of HoL.

...and the rhythm tracks and simplified progressions dominate _HoL_ just
as the complex melodies dominate _TD_.  Sure, _HoL_ is as much more
refined than _TD_ as _TD_ was of its predecessor (particularly as The
Ninth Wave was conceived as a progression of interlocked images/episodes)
but are the images cast into such sharp relief?  I don't think so.
_HoL_ is a vastly more subtle work, but sometimes to the point where it
falls short.  After dozens of listenings, I find that the pseudo-
crescendo at the end of RUTH (a popular scapegoat) does not work properly
for me.  I still find _The Dreaming_ to be the most ambitious of her albums,
possessed of more energy and creativity (roughness, if you must) than any
before or since, particularly when you consider that it was the first one
in which she assumed total artistic control.  As a contemporary musical
prodigy, Kate ha(s,d) few, if any, peers, but while the level of
refinement has increased, _HoL_ represents a visit to a different
tangent, one which I find less engaging than _TD_, if only marginally.
`Holy writ is holy writ', I believe you once pointed out.

>>TD is to HoL what a Turbo Esprit
>>is to a 928S -- far less passive (HoL PASSIVE?), laden with character,
>>and all the more endearing.
>
>Not having a good picture in his mind of the two cars you refer
>to, IED can only respond to the latter half of your analogy.
>You seem to be questioning your own opinion ("HoL PASSIVE?").
>IED does too. The Ninth Wave is definitely not more "passive" than
>The Dreaming  -- nor is it less "laden with character" or less
>"endearing".

The 928S (and in particular, the S4) has been called "simply the best
car in the world" by more than one auto reviewer.  It is also widely
considered to be so devoid of idiosyncracy that one could also accuse
it of being slightly boring, despite being one of the fastest cars in
existence.  Complete and utter attention to ergonomics.  Heavy and solid.
A large, powerful V-8.  Dead neutral handling.  Forgiving.  The Esprit
is a British creation, a product of Lotus Cars (and therefore conceptually
indebted to the late Colin Chapman) and is very definitely possessed
of numerous quirks.  Marginally adjustable seats.  A phenomenally light
and rigid structure.  A small engine, making it perhaps the most
expensive four-cylinder production car in the world.  Poorly behaved
at its limits.  And yet very, very fetching.  Something one easily
becomes attached to.  I know _I_ want one.  Someday...but I digress.

I meant "passive" in a respectful sense, as much as one could imagine
the Porsche being "passive".  When I first heard _HoL_ slightly less
than a year ago, it immediately struck me as being the most intensely
performed piece of modern work I'd ever listened to.  _TD_ just seems
to be that much _more_ involving, although the exact mechanism remains
a mystery to me.  For some reason, "Suspended in Gaffa" still evokes
more of my emotions than anything on The Ninth Wave.  Maybe I've blown
a fuse somewhere?

Such a bag of worms, this comparison.  It is all, in the end, primarily
a subjective matter.  I've only been listening to _The Dreaming_ for one
week now, and it's held me here transfixed before my D5 like no other
force in the universe.  How much of this is the result of various L-Hs'
insistence that _TD_ is the greatest entity in space and time?

[I get to practice mah' waxing here; this paragraph is only superficially
 related to the rest of this posting.  If you want your own just like it,
 drink 4 cups of coffee, listen to KT's work wandering through your mind,
 and try to be creative at 2am.]
It seems all too easy to create a |>oug Alanism here, an image of how
a tentative current runs deep in the execution of _The Dreaming_,
supporting a leafy raft of the thematic material itself; that microcosmic
Kate-viewed world with its wildly strewn scenery, from the baked earth
of aboriginal homelands to the lush curtain of an Asian jungle, from
the warm wisps of smoke issued by a medium's candles to the damp night
air of a London bank, from the empty, echoing promises of sorrowing friends
to the futility of hollow aspirations; adrift in a sea of musical brine,
borne high above the other flotsam by a swelling tide of genius, driven
relentlessly skyward by the pull of the Bush.

> Is there ANYTHING in twentieth century
>music MORE "endearing" than "And Dream of Sheep" or "The Morning Fog"?
>(RHETORICAL QUESTION! DON'T ANSWER THAT!!)
>
>-- Andrew

mrphrmmmmph. hmmmnmm pmmmmphth...

relaxed again,

-dave
-- 
David Hsu			Professional Undergrad & System Fascist
ARPA:	hsu@eneevax.umd.edu	UUCP: [seismo,allegra]!mimsy!eneevax!hsu
USNAIL: EE Computer Facility, Maryversity of Uniland, College Park, MD 20742