"Watching You Without Me" lyrics

[100427.2530@compuserve.com (Peter Chow)]

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Date: Sun, 14 May 1995 02:22:18 -0400
From: IEDSRI@aol.com
Subject: "Watching You Without Me" lyrics

>*** --"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. 
>   Similar to passages from "Waking the Witch", 
>   these lines seem to contain *different* words when
>   played backwards. Respectively, these are: 
>   "I was here before, you talked to me, you said 
>   that you didn't think it was too late to help
>   me..."; and "Talk to me, listen to me, talk 
>   to me, talk to me, baby..."  These latter words 
>   apparently were recorded within the momentary gaps 
>   which break up the forward-directional recording.]

Having listened to the 'chopped' passage backwards I can
find no words inserted in the gaps backwards. Come to think
of it, had there been something in the gaps they would not
have been gaps!

I read in an article (either in a KBC mag or some interview)
that Del said the gaps in the sound for the chopping effect
were created by spot erasing. Spot erasure is where
the erase head on the tape machine is engaged with the tape in
edit mode such that the tape transport does not function and
the tape can be moved past the heads by hand. It is normally
used for erasing small faults such as pops and gliches that
are too small to be erased in real time.

The chopped effect is made more effective by alternating 
between the left and right channels.

This process must have taken a considerable number of hours
to execute but gives rise to the controlled loss of words such
that they are inteligable. The use of an audio gate triggered
from an oscillator or simply flicking the mute switches on the
desk would have given unpredictable results, given that at the
time of mixing Kate only had a manual Soundcraft desk.

The subsequent major refit of her studio would have made the
effect much easier to program on the SSL desk (a G series with 
Total Recall, I think). The mutes could be programmed into the
desk and referenced to time code from tape to produce the
same effect without erasing the recording.

Peter Chow from Brighton (UK)