Re: End of "Leave it Open" (was: "Sat in Your Lap")

[martin@cs.curtin.edu.au (Martin Dougiamas)]

rmorrow@afit.af.MIL (Robert K Morrow) writes:
>sd@ira.uka.de (Sven Doerr) writes:
>>Interesting: forwards it really sounds like "We let the weirdness in".
>>I didn't realize this since I was so certain it is backwards. And
>>I still believe it is ! Played backwards, Kates voice is _much_clearer_
>>as forwards. The "lyrics" go (bw.) something like:
>>    and / they / said / they / wont / really / hear
>>        /      / sent / them / on a / weary  / here
>>        /      / sat  /      / want / very   /
>>but I cannot get them exactly. Perhaps there are even two slightly
>>different versions. Or - theory? - while the music plays, it is
>>forwards, and at the very end it is backwards, this way conditioning
>>the listener for what he has to hear on the following backwards
>>lines (and in my case: vice versa).
>>Maybe someone else wants to try to turn his record-player backwards
>>by hand, or can fool his dual head (autoreverse) cassette-recorder
>
>I remember reading on (I think) this newsgroup back in 1986 or so
>that Kate listened to a recorded track of "we let the weirdness in"
>backwards, practiced saying it that way, recorded it, reversed it,
>and thus created an amazing effect.

I just now sampled this passage digitally on my PowerBook, and played
it backwards.  I can quite clearly hear the following two lines
alternated and repeated:

            "And they said there was a wheel.
	     An' they said there was a whe-heel"

The words in this direction (backwards) are enunciated a lot more
conventionally (ie naturally) than the other direction.  For example,
the stretching of the LAST word in the phrase, "wheel", rather than
the first word of the reverse phrase..., and also the sequence of
notes she sings (actually, it sounds a bit like Greek singing to me,
but that's another story (which lends itself to the phrase "it's all
Greek to me", but I shan't mention that for fear of damaging my 
reputability, already dangerously low. :)  ) )

My conjecture : Kate was playing around with backwards recording one
day, trying lots of silly things, when she noticed that "We let the
weirdness in" sounded a bit like "And they said there was a wheel"
when played backwards.  So she sang the second phrase to see if 
it sounded like the first when played backwards. It did, and she
ended up using it in "Leave It Open".

I need hardly point out how significant the meanings of these two 
mutually reflective phrases are... quite a neat little feat, Miss Bush.

Another curious thing about the backwards recording is the presence
of a male voice saying "ooh!" sporadically in the background (Del Palmer?),
which barely comes through on the forwards version.  Makes you wonder...
It's a very short, forced sound... like someone being repeatedly 
bopped on the nose by a big, heavy soft thing.

I can email the sample to anyone who wants to hear it.
(It's a 9-second 22kHz Macintosh sound)

Until next time, I remain......    here.
--
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| All the deserts I could irrigate      Martin Dougiamas.      |   _r| Ll\
| All the poor I could emancipate    martin@cs.curtin.edu.au   |  |  |    \
| But that's not what interests me      Curtin University      |  \  |_   /
| I'm interested in apathy          Perth, Western Australia  -+-> x~  `-'
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