Watching and Watching. . .

[IEDSRI@aol.com]

In reference to the "backwards" (actually double-backwards,
thus forwards-again) passage in "Watching You Without Me",
John Walker (who is too kind!) remarks:

 > This had been bothering me as well.  I assumed it was
 > another language.  I would be interested in knowing how
 > this was discovered.

After several issues (and some two years) without a complete
solution to the content of the message ("Don't ignore, 
don't ignore me/Let me in and don't be long"), the Kate
Bush Club at long last put its members out of their misery
and published the longed-for information.

In re the later, "broken-up" sections of the same song
(which sound much like the broken-up bits from "Waking
the Witch"), IED wrote:

>> *** --"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. 

John replied: 

 > 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.

IED too is convinced that there is more to this passage than
you describe, mainly because when you listen to this section
backwards, the broken-up bits sound much the same as forwards --
except that the words are not the same! (Both forwards and 
backwards messages were included in the lyrics as posted the other day by
IED.) This remarkable fact led IED to suppose
that Kate actually synchronized the chopped-up slivers of silence
in the forward-directional track with the chopped-up slivers
of *vocals* in a second, similar-but-not-identical *backward*-
directional track.  It was this process to which IED was 
referring as a "sound-treatment known only to Kate". Certainly
it is the only such instance of which IED is aware.

Thanks for your interest in this endlessly fascinating subject.
The depths of "Watching You Without Me" have not yet been
plumbed!

-- Andrew Marvick (IED)
   S        R         I