KT NEWS; and IED, against a sea of naysayers, defends himself

[IED0DXM%OAC.UCLA.EDU@mitvma.mit.edu]

 To: Love-Hounds
 From: Andrew Marvick
 Subject: KT NEWS; and IED, against a sea of naysayers, defends himself

KT NEWS: Well, it's not really huge news. There is _yet_another_
Kate Bush bootleg CD out now. This time it's called _Kate_Bush_Live_,
and by its physical make-up IED strongly suspects that it is a new
product from the same group who have been putting out the now-famous
Beatles _Back-Track_ and _Off-White_ CDs. The package of this new KT
CD is a normal jewel-box, with a hard-card cover (folded over once),
and four colour photographs of Kate on the front. The track listings
are almost completely accurate and are clearly set out. The photo/track-
listing card is very sharply printed and glossy. Also on the cover is
a red official KBC "KT" symbol--though of course this is _not_ an
official producet.
     The CD contains fifteen tracks. The first twelve are simply the
same old _Live_at_Hammersmith_Odeon_ audio-track, though this time
it has been very well lifted from the new Japanese edition of the
laser-disk, which features a digital re-mastering of the original
analog tapes. Track thirteen is the live performance of _Running_Up_
That_Hill_ from the _Amnesty_International_Secret_Policeman's_Third_
Ball_:_The_Music_ CD. Track fourteen is the live performance of
_Breathing_ from the _Comic_Relief:_Utterly_Utterly_Live_ CD. And
track fifteen is the track _This_Woman's_Work_ from the _She's_Having_
a_Baby_ soundtrack CD. The three extra tracks are re-mixed so that
the applause from the end of the _Hammersmith_ tape fades into the
applause from _Running_Up_That_Hill_, and ditto for _Breathing_.
The only error in the track-listing is in the identification of the
two live tracks as both coming from 1988. Actually both are from at
least a year earlier. No big deal. The sound is (from the casual
listen IED was able to make in the store) very clean and crystal
clear, and it contains three tracks that are kind of hard to come by
legitimately now. So IED guesses that this CD will find a market,
though of course "it would be wrong".

Now on to the mailbag:

 >>More importantly, it's the artist's larger conception
 >>of the _role_ of production as an indispensible part of music. With
 >>_The_Dreaming_ "pop songs" are no longer being "composed". Kate is
 >>attempting instead to transcribe the miraculous essence of her muse
 >>_directly_onto_tape_, using every technical means she could find. In other
 >>words, Kate Bush, for the first time in modern musical history, attempted
 >>in a very physical, literal sense, to perform an act of _musical_alchemy_.
 >
 >Let me get this straight...you're trying to tell me that you don't
 >believe that ANYONE had done this before 1982???!!?!!?!?!?  You're kidding
 >right?  Immediately three names pop into my head.  Rick Wakeman.  He produced
 >ALL of his albums, and did a damn good job on several of them before 1982.

     We have a misunderstanding here. IED was trying to describe a
rather abstract concept; he did _not_ say Kate was "the first person to
record/perform/produce/write all her own work, for chrissake!" Those were
_not_ IED's words. Admittedly his words were not very clear, however.
For what it's worth, his contention was that Kate's _attitude_toward_
the act of making music itself was new and different, in that she was no
longer trying to "translate" into relatively well-established terms
the original music she had conceived. Instead she was trying to
reproduce _directly_ the ideas in her head. IED would argue that
although others may have been the instigators of the ideas which they
subsequently recorded/produced themselves (such as the artists you
mentioned), they were unquestionably constrained by one of two
attitudes or conditions which Kate Bush, with _The_Dreaming_, was
able to free herself from (to at least a greater degree): either 1.)
the notion that the transcendent musical conceptions originating in the
mind are unreproduceable and can therefore only be _paralleled_ in more
conventional and established terms (i.e. through rock or other
instruments, recorded and possibly "treated" in some way in the
studio); or 2.) the more common condition--that the artist's musical
ideas are actually _conceived_ in the conventional language of existing
sound. IED believes that Kate's _The_Dreaming_ introduces a whole
new level of _alchemic_musical_creation_, far beyond--as regards both
scope of conception and thoroughness of execution--anything which
either "Rick Wakeman" or "Frank Zappa" or "Pink Floyd" or any of these
types had ever achieved before. Now before you get mad again, remember
that IED prefaced this opinion yesterday with the admission that his
is a personal opinion, based upon an admittedly obsessive and as a
result exclusionary musical outlook. He does want it to be understood,
however, that he was _not_ contending that Kate was the first artist
to produce her own music! ALCHEMY! That's what IED is talking about--
ALCHEMY!

-- Andrew Marvick