She weaves multiple musical styles and genres into her songs, including Western classical and a wide range of non-Western and folk musics. In addition to being the first musical artist to use a sampling synthesizer on an album, in 1978 she was the first performer to fashion a wireless headset microphone (out of a coat hanger). Her style is sometimes referred to as “post progressive” due to her bold approach to themes of love and relationships, and other topics usually presented from a male perspective, by earlier British progressive acts like Yes and Genesis. 1 single by a woman, and she was the first solo female artist to enter the UK album charts in 1980 for her album Never for Ever. Her first single, “Wuthering Heights”, from 1978, was the first self-written UK no. She was one of the first female artists to write and produce her own albums, taking sole production credit since 1982’s The Dreaming. She is so many things to so many people: groundbreaking artist, songwriter, performer, producer, feminist, technologist, choreographer and video artist come immediately to mind. I also realized that presenting anything useful about Kate Bush in the space of an hour, while leaving ample time for listening, was just about impossible. As a child of the 80’s, sounds like these are etched into my musical DNA. This album relied largely on the iconic sounds she conjured from of her Fairlight CMI, the first sampler-based music synthesizer/workstation, which came out in 1979. It’s an embarrassment of musical riches, from Bush’s wonderful melodic sense, to her adventurous use of unusual forms and harmonies within a pop music context, to her hyper-expressive and utterly unique style as a performer, to the intertwining of music with other art forms like dance and literature, and finally to her constantly surprising use of time and spatial effects in her mixes. World wars have broken out over less.University of Massachusetts Lowell Department of Music Spring 2021 Headphone Lecture Series:įor tonight’s session, I knew that I wanted to share some of Kate Bush’s music with you, simply because from the first time I heard her Hounds of Love years ago, it immediately became my favorite album. But if Deeper Understanding raised hackles, imagine if Kate had gone dubstep or collaborated with Odd Future. No, because it’s not radical enough a move. No, because it’s writer’s block by any other name. As much as it’s fascinating to hear Bush the Elder look back at Bush the Younger, is the tinkering worth a full album? Yes, because it’s a sign Bush the Artist is still alive (she’s working on new songs too) and Director’s Cut (a less prosaic title would have been nice) is a gorgeous body of work. Just as Bush sounds in great voice – richer, bolder, brighter, wiser – so the re-cast Lily and The Red Shoes’ title-track follow suit, but they’re hardly re-inventions. Yet, musically, it’s rather more cosmetic. The Sensual World’s title-track, now re-named Flower of the Mountain and borrowing Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from James Joyce’s novel Ulysses as Bush intended (she was originally denied permission), is another major alteration. Rubberband Girl, which in context sounds like a knees-up down her local boozer, comes over like the work of a totally different band (weirdly, that band is now The Rolling Stones). Minus the choc-box orchestra (plus subtly altered lyrics), the rest of Moments of Pleasure emerges into the light, shaded by a solemn choir. Gone are the gated drums, the keyboard presets, the Synclavier washes in comes a softer, golden glow. All the vocals and drums on Director’s Cut – totalling four tracks from 1989’s The Sensual World, seven from 1993’s The Red Shoes – are new if such a term existed, you could say the overall execution has been to ‘de-80s-fy’ the originals. She’s had the urge to tinker before, sprucing up Wuthering Heights for her 1986 greatest hits, The Whole Story. The problem is less that Bush’s new album consists of old songs than the fact she’s only released one album of new ones in 18 years. A bonus two-minute coda of Talk Talk-style folk-jazz floatiness extends the mood of blissful angst. Instead, it’s just the song’s computer voice, which now resembles 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL 9000 rather than a demo on a kid’s Casio. It’s not as if Bush’s own vocal was altered. But as Bon Iver and Sufjan Stevens have already shown, Auto-Tune – a pitch-shifting tool typically used to mask defects – can also be used for beauty. How dare she play with our memories? How dare she use Auto-Tune on the chorus vocal? "Butchered" and "almost unforgivable" cried the fansites. When Deeper Understanding emerged as the first evidence of Kate Bush’s new album of revisions, the instant reaction was surprise tinged with anger.
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