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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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