"Watching You Without Me"

[JWALKER.ENG-MAIL@SMTP.INTECOM.COM (Walker, John)]

Howdy Hounds!

Last episode, IED said:
>* --"Don't ignore, don't ignore me...": This verse, 
>   the erstwhile "mystery message", immediately follows 
>   the Morse code "S.O.S." signal.  The message was long 
>   the subject of a Kate Bush Club competition. It sounds 
>   more like "Zwoh-nikh-noh, zwoh-nikh-noh nee, 
>   et-nee nong-widz-aw nee noy" than the actual words
>   Kate Bush is singing. This is because the phrase 
>   was originally spoken, then recorded and played
>   backwards; Kate listened to the sound of the reversed
>   phonetics and learned to sing them with an inverse
>   of the melody she intended for that section; and 
>   this in turn was recorded and fed into the final
>   recording in backwards form, creating the correct
>   forward words with the original, intended melody,
>   but sounding "backwards" and very odd.

This had been bothering me as well.  I assumed it was
another language.  I would be interested in knowing how
this was discovered.  Email with details if anyone has
them.  IED, you are truly amazing!

>*** --"Listen to me, baby...", etc.: The words in 
>   this passage, and in one which follows later in 
>   the song, are fractured by some
>   sound-treatment process known only to Kate. 

I might be able to shed some light on this.  One very
simple way to achieve the "fractured" sound of these
passages would be to use a switch, either on the microphone
itself or by routing the signal through a switch after it was
recorded, and just turn the vocal signal on and off while recording it
to an open track.  There is some other processing going on
here as well which I can't identify - sounds like reverb and
some midrange boost, but it could be more than that.  There
are electronic methods of achieving this effect but I don't think
they would be "fractured" enough.

Bear in mind that I have no idea what was actually done, 
only my ears and a little time in the recording studio.  8-)

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