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They told us all they wanted was a sound that could kill someone from a distance
Kate Bush's "Experiment IV" is one of my favorite horror stories and it's only four minutes and nineteen seconds long.
I am talking about the song, not the music video. I don't dislike the latter, but it's much easier to follow. It's a kind of miniature Nigel Kneale, tracking the horrific success of a secret government project to create a sonic weapon—working on the edge of science and sympathetic magic, what they get instead is something like a siren (played by Bush herself), an initially alluring apparition that circles its test subject like a curious goldfish, all fair curls and streaming iridescent ribbons, before its face shreds into a deep-sea ghoul-mask of needle teeth and rotting fins and then there is no containing it. The researchers all die, caught in its darkening wind; the lights go out, meters and meters of magnetic tape unspool like a winding sheet, the facility is a wasteland of blowing papers and banging doors and even the general who commissioned the project is killed when he answers his red phone. We're watching the end of things. The last shot is of the boarded-up block of shops that once housed the facility entrance, already as trashed and deserted as post-apocalypse, while the sound in human form hitches a ride with an unsuspecting quarantine worker, slyly warning the audience not to tell.
The song is more or less the same story, but vaguer, and that's one of the things I love about it. The narrative voice is collective, apologetic: We only know in theory what we are doing . . . It was music we were making here until. The sound is compounded of the painful cries of mothers . . . the terrifying scream, but it feels like falling in love . . . It could sing you to sleep, but that dream is your enemy. As to what it's meant to sound like extra-diegetically, our only clue is the wash of high, haunting violin sweeping through the chorus, glass-ringing and eerie. It makes a sweet, yearning fall at first, but it scales up to a painful thin edge as it begins to intrude on the verse. And we don't see the apocalypse. There's not even any frenzy. Just the hopelessness, a clear cold recognition: We won't be there to be blamed, we won't be there to snitch. I just pray that someone there can hit the switch. Helicopter noises fade out the track. Are they evacuating the area? Trying to destroy the very weapon they asked for? There's no way to tell; the world ends not with a bang but with a bland public service announcement. And the public are warned to stay off.
Even more suggestively, when not given lab coats and the familiar faces of Hugh Laurie, Dawn French, and Richard Vernon, they might not even be scientists, these resigned, complicit narrators. The lyrics mention only music made for pleasure, music made to thrill—think of Delia Derbyshire's soundtrack for The Legend of Hell House (1973) and they could be experimental musicians in the sci-fi/horror vein, tape loops and musique concrète. We recorded it and put it into our machine . . . It's a mistake in the making. Science has ended the world any number of times, but art? Maybe if I watched more Cronenberg, but right now I've got Gemma Files and Stephen J. Barringer's "each thing I show you is a piece of my death" and otherwise I'll need recommendations. I love this shadowiness of the song: it's a cautionary tale, but not necessarily the most familiar kind. We're told so little. It wouldn't help to know more.
But mostly it is an amazingly creepy song and I've been listening to it on and off for days; I've had it on my computer for years now and I never write about music, but like any good haunting, it wants to be passed on.
Now it's your turn.
I am talking about the song, not the music video. I don't dislike the latter, but it's much easier to follow. It's a kind of miniature Nigel Kneale, tracking the horrific success of a secret government project to create a sonic weapon—working on the edge of science and sympathetic magic, what they get instead is something like a siren (played by Bush herself), an initially alluring apparition that circles its test subject like a curious goldfish, all fair curls and streaming iridescent ribbons, before its face shreds into a deep-sea ghoul-mask of needle teeth and rotting fins and then there is no containing it. The researchers all die, caught in its darkening wind; the lights go out, meters and meters of magnetic tape unspool like a winding sheet, the facility is a wasteland of blowing papers and banging doors and even the general who commissioned the project is killed when he answers his red phone. We're watching the end of things. The last shot is of the boarded-up block of shops that once housed the facility entrance, already as trashed and deserted as post-apocalypse, while the sound in human form hitches a ride with an unsuspecting quarantine worker, slyly warning the audience not to tell.
The song is more or less the same story, but vaguer, and that's one of the things I love about it. The narrative voice is collective, apologetic: We only know in theory what we are doing . . . It was music we were making here until. The sound is compounded of the painful cries of mothers . . . the terrifying scream, but it feels like falling in love . . . It could sing you to sleep, but that dream is your enemy. As to what it's meant to sound like extra-diegetically, our only clue is the wash of high, haunting violin sweeping through the chorus, glass-ringing and eerie. It makes a sweet, yearning fall at first, but it scales up to a painful thin edge as it begins to intrude on the verse. And we don't see the apocalypse. There's not even any frenzy. Just the hopelessness, a clear cold recognition: We won't be there to be blamed, we won't be there to snitch. I just pray that someone there can hit the switch. Helicopter noises fade out the track. Are they evacuating the area? Trying to destroy the very weapon they asked for? There's no way to tell; the world ends not with a bang but with a bland public service announcement. And the public are warned to stay off.
Even more suggestively, when not given lab coats and the familiar faces of Hugh Laurie, Dawn French, and Richard Vernon, they might not even be scientists, these resigned, complicit narrators. The lyrics mention only music made for pleasure, music made to thrill—think of Delia Derbyshire's soundtrack for The Legend of Hell House (1973) and they could be experimental musicians in the sci-fi/horror vein, tape loops and musique concrète. We recorded it and put it into our machine . . . It's a mistake in the making. Science has ended the world any number of times, but art? Maybe if I watched more Cronenberg, but right now I've got Gemma Files and Stephen J. Barringer's "each thing I show you is a piece of my death" and otherwise I'll need recommendations. I love this shadowiness of the song: it's a cautionary tale, but not necessarily the most familiar kind. We're told so little. It wouldn't help to know more.
But mostly it is an amazingly creepy song and I've been listening to it on and off for days; I've had it on my computer for years now and I never write about music, but like any good haunting, it wants to be passed on.
Now it's your turn.
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While you've been listening to that, I've been grooving to Janelle Monáe. Are there any other female SF musicians?
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The end-of-the-world song of hers that got me most was "Hello Earth," though.
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There is a distinct possibility my favorite Kate Bush song is still "Coffee Homeground," which was the first one I heard. It's such a weird little cabaret piece, like Brecht does Arsenic and Old Lace ("There was a tall man and his companion / And I bet you gave them coffee homeground"), with the same shivery screwball humor of the macabre. I heard it first in October and it's one of my autumn songs. "Experiment IV," obviously. After that I have a lot of trouble picking, because I return to different songs in different moods. I don't know how many times I've listened to "Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)." But I also don't have anything like a complete discography of hers, and should really fix that sometime.
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Kate Bush is amazing at conveying menace in a way her contemporaries tend not to.
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(Is a good story, too.)
Kate Bush is amazing at conveying menace in a way her contemporaries tend not to.
Yes. I can think of very few unhaunted stories of hers. Even something like "Oh! England, My Lionheart" with its pastoral images of apple-blossom and clover and its romantic London of umbrellas and Shakespeare on the Thames is the nostalgic reverie of a Spitfire pilot going down over enemy territory in flames. I love "Suspended in Gaffa," because it's a mystic's song, which means there's not anything straightforward about its relationship with God: It's a plank in my eye with a camel who's trying to get through it—am I doing it? Can I have it all now? I want it all. I find it an earworm and not necessarily a comfortable thing to go around singing.
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Oh, cool. The only song of hers I know is "The Proximity of Death (Blue-Eyed Boy)," which is in great dialogue with e.e. cummings.
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I don't even know who this is. Talk to me about her music, even if you can't play me any?
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—who's performing in Boston in October and I should buy tickets, thank you for reminding me!
Are there any other female SF musicians?
Sophia Cacciola, the songwriter/drummer/vocalist of Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling. (The bassist, Michael J. Epstein, is the other half of the band.) They're two EPs into a project to record a complete cycle of songs inspired by The Prisoner, one for each episode. They refer to their aesthetic as "spy-fi."
I want to include the Pack a.d. for their most recent album Unpersons (2011), which is full of sea monsters, vengeful ghosts, and androids, but I don't know about their music ordinarily.
Poly Styrene, y/n?
In short, I can think of a lot more female-written music from the fantastic side of things, yeah.
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Sovay, I think you may have just introduced me to my new favourite band!
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If you give me ten minutes, I will send you a lot of music. I love them. They remain very possibly the only band I have ever discovered from reading the arts section of the newspaper—there was a short article about them in the Globe in April 2010, the day before their first EP release, and I was sick and behind on my work and I needed to negotiate a ride from my brother in order to get to a club in Boston I'd never heard of, and it was awesome. They perform with a giant white weather balloon onstage. I have a T-shirt for their second EP that I have painstakingly and paranoiacally hand-washed to save from other laundry, because it's totally irreplaceable. I've missed their last couple of shows from a combination of health and other circumstances, but since they're based in Somerville and now I am too, I am not really worried.
Also, watch this video.
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I think the thing I take from it, and like, is the sense of creating something--knowing you're trying to create something--designed to kill, but at the same time beautiful. So like if the siren never turned into the deep sea ghoul, as if it was beauty all the way down to death, the horror of *that* being that everyone rushes right toward it without your being able to stop it and without even there being any fear and regret--except in those still at enough of a distance to watch.
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Which starts me thinking about when the contagious haunting became an apocalyptic trope, because it certainly is now—Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Kairo—but I don't know if it was in 1986.
the sense of creating something--knowing you're trying to create something--designed to kill, but at the same time beautiful. So like if the siren never turned into the deep sea ghoul, as if it was beauty all the way down to death
Yes. The song doesn't say otherwise. And why not? Rilke, the opening of the Duino Elegies that everyone quotes for good reason:
Denn das Schöne ist nichts
als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen,
und wir bewunderen es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht,
uns zu zerstören. Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich.
Because beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror we can barely endure,
and we wonder at it so, because it casually disdains
to destroy us. Every angel is terrifying.
everyone rushes right toward it without your being able to stop it and without even there being any fear and regret--except in those still at enough of a distance to watch.
That's chilling. You should write it.
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What we discovered was that all the deaths in that first film take place in complete isolation. Each death happens in isolation and is unremarked, and each person heads into his or her own death without knowing what's happened to any of the others, and consequently they have no fear whatsoever--until seconds before they're shot full of arrows or have their throats slit, etc. And this made it all--at least for us (perhaps a jaded audience? too 21st century? dunno)--very un-scary. It was only when you got to the sole survivor, who discovered the other bodies, realized there was mass murder going on, that we started feeling some fear, because she was scared. She knew she might die at any moment, and she was (understandably) frightened--and watching her fright was frightening.
... Okay, you know what, I realize that's actually pretty much the inverse of watching people running ecstatically toward death, and toward a death that you've created. Instead of pain and regret at being the cause of death you can't stop and that the people themselves go running toward, all unawares, in this case you've got gruesome deaths that have no ability to terrify precisely because the victims go into them without fear, all unknowing.
[sorry so many edits; disordered thinking...]
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Having never seen the movie and knowing only its reputation as a seminal slasher film, that isn't what I would have expected. There's no sense of cumulative building dread for the characters, only the audience if it works that way; if it doesn't, then none. How did you find the rest of the film?
[sorry so many edits; disordered thinking...]
Tiny Wittgenstein, get out of here!
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I had zero expectations, and it fulfilled them. We only watched it as a Thing to Do because the date matched and because it is such a cultural icon. However, some icons are dumb, and this is one. I guess I can say that it was interesting from a cultural perspective? The sex-is-bad motif, made absolutely explicit at the end by the crazy psycho killer (not Jason, the pretty-much-undead killer in all the rest of the movies, but his mother), who, feeling absolutely no compunction about just straight up explaining, in a longish monologue, why she's been killing everyone, announces that it's because years ago her son drowned at the camp because the lifeguards who should have been watching were instead making love. That'll teach 'em to make love on the job! And the Final Girl, sure enough, was frumpier and more sensible than all the other girls, though pretty useless once she got terrified--busy trying to barricade a door when two great windows stand on either side of the door, for instance.
Long story short, I always suspected a slasher movie would be boring, and this one, aside from the entertainment value of stilted dialogue and late 1970s fashions, was indeed boring.
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That is more interesting than an undead killer, although it probably means that the film conceptually fails the Bechdel test right off.
who, feeling absolutely no compunction about just straight up explaining, in a longish monologue, why she's been killing everyone, announces that it's because years ago her son drowned at the camp because the lifeguards who should have been watching were instead making love. That'll teach 'em to make love on the job!
No one should ever have sex again!
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Thank you! I don't usually try. I think the last major time was when I was blithering about Hadestown.
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Wikipedia says the official video was banned from Top of the Pops for being too violent. ;)
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You're welcome! At the point where I realized I was just replaying the song, I figured I might as well do something with the obsessing.
Wikipedia says the official video was banned from Top of the Pops for being too violent.
Well, it does gruesomely kill Hugh Laurie. I can see that.
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That makes sense; it's scary! I tend to find her music videos more interesting than definitive, if that makes sense. I do really like the one for "This Woman's Work," which I always heard as a dying-in-childbirth story, but I prefer the video's alternative.
"Kate Bush and the Soft Face of Death," here
Awesome. I've been running errands. Will go and read.
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You're welcome. I try to write about things that interest me.
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http://music.kimboekbinder.com/album/the-sky-is-calling-2
(though more science music than science fiction?)
my brain has been serving me up a mashup of "experiment IV" and RDJ/sting's "driven to tears" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy2-B4Wl8WI) for the past week, so this seemed especially apropos.
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Works for me! It's not like I have so much of that, either.
and RDJ/sting's "driven to tears"
Dude. I didn't know Robert Downey, Jr. could sing. Thank you!
so this seemed especially apropos.
I am glad to be part of this zeitgeist.
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discovering that not only does RDJ pretty much always act like tony stark, but he can also SING did not help.
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I can see how it wouldn't, no.
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Oh hey, look, I didn't know there was a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AryXkeAoCec
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Dance On A Volcano
Entangled
Squonk
Mad Man Moon
Robbery, Assault And Battery - (Quite possibly my favorite on the album)
Ripples
A Trick Of The Tail - (Second favorite)
Los Endos
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There's an extended version from the 12" single, but the drum track sounds like the same to me. I like being able to hear the violin solo at the beginning, though.
Come to think of it, the whole album is kind of cool like that. It's all kind of morality tales with a bit of dark in it.
The only Genesis I know is Peter Gabriel-era, and then mostly very early and scattered. I have a copy of "The Fountain of Salmacis" from Nursery Cryme (1971), for example, because the only musical retelling I know of that myth.
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Kate Bush's first two albums are still probably my favorites of hers, though I also love "Sat In Your Lap," which, years and years ago, I used as the soundtrack for a Buffy music vid about Willow's witchcraft. It's still on YouTube, and they didn't wipe the music!
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Cool! (Thanks for the link!)
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Man, now I want someone to edit a book of nontraditional apocalypses. No zombies, no nukes, plagues only if they're really weird ones. I wonder who I could get to fund me for it.
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Hmm. Has anyone done anything like it recently?
(But for example—)