Love-Hounds-request@EDDIE.MIT.EDU (03/18/87)
Really-From: IED0DXM%UCLAMVS.BITNET@wiscvm.wisc.edu KT Info bank: IED has had numerous requests for the new address of Break-Through. Here it is: Robyn Carstairs Break-Through #23-66 Paddington Road Winnipeg, Manitoba R2N-1P7 CANADA Robyn is very anxious to get material as soon as possible, so if you have news or comments of any kind concerning Kate Bush, and you want more than just the Love-Hounds to notice them, please consider printing them out and sending them off to her. Here in this forum lurk an eminent faculty of Doctors of Kate Bushology, and they owe the KommuniTy of the world the benefit of their insights. Now, the mail-bag: From: Mark Ganzer >And KBVI will elevate us all to another plane, replace "The Dreaming" >as the "greatest entity in all of space and time", but have only >mediocre commercial success. Then we will be back to square one.:-) >Actually, I'm not optimistic about the possibility of a world tour. But you are optimistic about the importance of KBVI! Personally, IED expects it to be about as good as HoL, but not necessarily something on the order of The Dreaming (see, IED has been brainwashed by |>oug and the rest of you guys! Happy?). That is, it's not at all clear that Kate will swing back in the direction of inaccessibility. >Because her music has become so much more complex since the last tour, >I think it would be extremely difficult to put together a stage performance >that would be up to her standards. As much as everybody would like to see >a tour, would we be happy seeing her perform in front of a tape machine? No, but neither would Kate, so there's not much chance of that happening. It's true that it would be extremely difficult, but Kate's last tour introduced a number of technological and theatrical precedents, and it's not unreasonable to expect that the next one will introduce still more. Anyway, Kate has said herself that the live musical performance cannot be as detailed or complete as the recorded one, so presumably she'll work out ways of reproducing the kernel of each piece without trying to include every subtlety, while amplifying the music in new and exclusively theatrical ways. >Also, the interval between new albums is unbearable already. Actually, it isn't, at least not for this fan. Personally, IED appreciates her all the more with each passing month of frustration! If you look at her rate of production not in the context of pop music but of the history of western music in general, she isn't really that slow. Bruckner didn't write his first symphony till he was more than forty; ditto Brahms -- and he only finished four in his lifetime. (True, he put out a ton of other stuff, and Kate does fall short in the category of secondary works. But what matters is quality, not quantity.) >Can we bear >the thought that the 18-24 months involved to put together a world tour >would not be spent writing new music? Now, there's a point. It will be a little frustrating. But with Kate Bush, the tour will definitely represent a major new work of art, not just performances of old songs; so the concerts (and the live records and films that will undoubtedly follow) should themselves contain a great many fascinating new ideas. >Right now, I'd be happy to get my >hands on more video... What sort of video? Old stuff, or new? >Apologies for this being outside the scope of this group,but can anyone >out there recommend a good _TECHNICAL_ introduction to this >technology. I'm familiar enough with A/D & D/A conversions and Fourier >transforms, but I'd like to see how its all put together... That's a good question. Wouldn't the most complete explanations be obtained through Fairlight, Ltd. themselves? Another thing to do is to find out through the best local electronic instrument dealer when a demonstration for professionals might be scheduled, no? In L.A., Westwood Music and The Guitar Center have had seminars, and in fact there was an announcement in the L.A. Times the other day about a four-session seminar on the use of samplers and Computer Programming Instruments, at UCLA, if IED remembers rightly. (Of course, it cost $495.00.) There's some stuff on the Fairlight and other less expensive samplers in a magazine supplement called Understanding MIDI (or something), which IED believes was put out by Keyboard or Electronic Musician, or something; seen it around in shops locally. Also, Byte and several other computer magazines have had issues devoted to CPI's in past months. But you're probably already way ahead of all the above; sorry. >Subject: Backward masking >I love Kate, I even understand some of her songs, and was wondering what >kinds of things are backward masked into her songs, having missed >those discussions. > >-- Steve Yes, it has been discussed in L-Hs before, but since no-one has come up with the solution to the latest problem yet, an excessively boring and long-winded re-capitulation doesn't seem out of order, especially since most people just scroll past IED's longer entries anyway! There have only been two so-called "backwards tracks" in Kate's music to date, as far as anyone knows so far. The first appears in The Dreaming, specifically in the last minute of "Leave It Open". The Kate Bush Club made a competition out of the passage, offering a prize to the first member to come up with the correct message that Kate sings in the fade-out of the song. Nobody came up with the correct solution for several issues, which is to say for more than a year. The first problem was that the vocal track SOUNDED exactly like a backwards-masked track, but WASN'T one, strictly speaking. The second problem was that there was also an instrumental sound underneath Kate's fade-out chorus which WAS being played backwards. In fact, the mystery message was more complicated than a simple backwards-masked track, such as the mystery tracks on the Beatles' "Revolution #9", for example. In most (if not all) earlier cases of backwards-masking, the artist simply recorded a message (or played some music) normally, then added that recording to the mix by playing the tape backwards. The Beatles did a lot of backwards-masked music on Revolver, and the difficulty was in coming up with a piece of guitar-playing (for example) that actually fit in with the chord-structure of the song when it was played back backwards in synch with the forwards tracks. George Harrison apparently played many slightly different solos on the Revolver tracks, until one of them happened to sound good when played backwards with the songs. The task wasn't really very difficult for the Beatles, since part of their intention was to add a lot of surreality and confusion to the recording, and a little imprecision of chords and notes was seen as a plus for the music, not a mistake. For Kate, however, nothing that haphazard has ever been acceptable -- especially on an album track. Therefore, for the fade-out of "Leave It Open", she first composed the exact musical (melodic) line that she wanted people to hear when they simply played the record straight. Then she set that phrase to the words, "We let the weirdness in." Next, she recorded that melodic line, and listened to the weird phonetic sounds that came out when the passage was played backwards. She then proceeded to imitate those sounds as precisely as possible, following not only the phonetics that the backwards playback produced, but also the new, inverted melody that resulted. Once she had learned this new passage perfectly, she then performed it as though it were a normal chorus; synched that version up with the master tape; and let it play BACKWARDS with the fade-out. The result was a message that was note for note the same as the musical passage she had originally intended, but with sounds altered just enough so that it SOUNDED like backwards gibberish, but wasn't. During the year before someone (a Dutch fan) finally solved the puzzle, a large number of suggestions came in with answers more or less similar to the line, "They said they were buried here;" that line obtained by people playing (BACKWARDS) Kate's weirdly distorted FORWARDS vocal of "We let the weirdness in." At the 1985 Kate Bush Convention in England, Paddy Bush gave a little demonstration of just how Kate went about making the track. But he didn't actually say that she had used the same method on Hounds of Love... Well, once all this had been discovered, some fans suspected that Kate had been having a little joke at our expense. So, when the Hounds of Love album came out, they really didn't know what to expect. Sure enough, there was a new mystery passage in The Ninth Wave, specifically starting at about 2:19 into the track called "Watching You Without Me". There are actually two parts to this track, and that's part of the puzzle. First there is a message which, when played normally on a record player, sounds sort of like: "Zwoh-nikh-lawn, zwoh-nikh-lawn-eet; ett nee-eed nawng width-aw-nee noy." This two-bar passage is sung, in all, three times. Then there follows a second weird phonetic passage, which a lot of fans thought sounded like "We receive, we receive;" or "We recede"; or "Really see." Whereas the first passage is sung in octaves, with a distinctive tambourine rhythm track and someone (or the Fairlight) going "Yup!" periodically in the background, this follow-up passage was sparser, and turned out to be easier to solve. Apparently, when played backwards, this second passage seems to consist of Kate singing "We see you here, we see you here," or something very similar. And that makes perfect sense in the context of the song's story. It wasn't surprising, therefore to find that this passage was not included by the Club Newsletter in the "mystery" passage for the new competition. So concentration has been put on the "Zwoh-neekh-lawn..." section; and so far, one fan has come up with the first six words. Only no-one knows which fan is right (presumably not even the fan knows for sure), and no-one knows what those six words are yet. The only clues we've been given are: that the message is a sentence of twelve words, sung three times; and that the first word of the message is "Don't". IED, for one, has gotten absolutely nowhere with it, and is certain that he will feel like an even bigger fool when he is told the answer than he did when the answer to the "Leave It Open" message was revealed. But at least he will be able to console himself with the knowledge that, loyal Lionheart that he is, he gave it a good try. -- Andrew Marvick
Love-Hounds-request@EDDIE.MIT.EDU.UUCP (03/20/87)
Really-From: ganzer%trout@nosc.mil (Mark T. Ganzer) ------- >From: IED0DXM%UCLAMVS.BITNET@wiscvm.wisc.edu >>Me: >>And KBVI will elevate us all to another plane, replace "The Dreaming" >>as the "greatest entity in all of space and time", but have only >>mediocre commercial success. Then we will be back to square one.:-) >>Actually, I'm not optimistic about the possibility of a world tour. >But you are optimistic about the importance of KBVI! Personally, >IED expects it to be about as good as HoL, but not necessarily >something on the order of The Dreaming (see, IED has been brainwashed >by |>oug and the rest of you guys! Happy?). That is, it's not at >all clear that Kate will swing back in the direction of inaccessibility. I was being facetious! I do agree that she probably won't make the mistake again of not having at least one or two "commercial" tracks. On the other hand, I don't expect to see another HoL either. When I have a chance, I like to listen to the albums in chronological order, and I am always impressed with the changes and growth in her music. Frankly, I would be disappointed if KBVI is not at least as different from "The Nineth Wave" side of HoL as TNW was from "The Dreaming". And with the confidence (and bank account) restored by the success of HoL and TWS, I am hoping it will be a bold step forward. But of course, this is all just idle speculation... >>Because her music has become so much more complex since the last tour, >>I think it would be extremely difficult to put together a stage performance >>that would be up to her standards... >It's true that it would be extremely difficult, but Kate's last tour >introduced a number of technological and theatrical precedents, and >it's not unreasonable to expect that the next one will introduce still >more. Anyway, Kate has said herself that the live musical performance >cannot be as detailed or complete as the recorded one, so presumably >she'll work out ways of reproducing the kernel of each piece without >trying to include every subtlety, while amplifying the music in new >and exclusively theatrical ways. After making my comment, I spent the better part of two days travelling with Kate playing on the Walkman almost constantly, thinking about this question, and pretty much came to the same conclusion. In listening to "The Kick Inside" and "Lionheart" after listening to the Hammersmith concert soundtrack, the vocals seem flat. There is much more color and emotional expression in the live performance. This, plus the added theatrical expression would more than compensate for the musical compromises. Much of subtlety could be retained through judicious use of pre-recorded passages (something she did do in the last tour). One thing I would love to see would be Paddy Bush playing the musical saw! > ... But with Kate >Bush, the tour will definitely represent a major new work of art, not >just performances of old songs; so the concerts (and the live records >and films that will undoubtedly follow) should themselves contain >a great many fascinating new ideas. Theatrically, I'm sure it would. Unfortunately, because most people go to concerts to hear performances of old songs, most of the time will be spent in choreographing and arranging the old works. I doubt much new music would find its way into the show. Of course, if a concert film were made, I would it would show the entire show. I despise the editing in the Hammersmith concert tape! I would kill to see the unedited tapes of that show. >>Right now, I'd be happy to get my >>hands on more video... >What sort of video? Old stuff, or new? The only video I have is the Hammersmith concert. Being a relative newcomer to this group, I missed all the updates of when her videos were on the air. Of course, besides what is normally available (The Single File, the Hair of the Hound lazer-disk), I'd be interested in other performances and interviews. Enough of this, I have to head off to the Pacific Northwest for the next week or so... Mark T. Ganzer Naval Ocean Systems Center, San Diego Internet: ganzer@trout.nosc.mil UUCP: {ucbvax,hplabs}!sdcsvax!nosc!ganzer -------