![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
no subject
no subject
no subject
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.