http://www.steveroach.com

This guy creates the most incredible electronic soundscapes or soundworlds, what might be called “atmospheric space music”. He has a very long
list of ground-breaking recordings.
The link

http://www.steveroach.com/Audio/Audio.html

gives some radio shows that are a good intro, especially the one-hour show “Music from the hearts of space”. Don’t let the new-age feel of of his site out you off, this guy is brilliant, but it makes sense for him to tap into that market. Play his cd “The Magnificent Void” (one of his more haunting and cosmic works) through headphones at night if you really want to capture a sense of just how vast and scary the universe is. I have been playing it all week. Recommended to all cosmologists:)
There is a discography section on the page with clips too.

I am happy to hear about the new album and can’t wait to give it a listen. I have an iPod and was bummed at the staggering lack of Kate in their store. Maybe a whole new generation of listeners will get into her work and then they’ll do a better job.

Thanks for the good news!!

Please, Clifford, write a review when you’ve heard the album.

No, I don’t believe in that sort of thing at all, overall. I think there is always this prevailing mood of how terribly “modern” we’ve become, that feeling of “we’ve never been here before”, and more and more I realize that is seldom true, where it really matters. I think the journey of discovery in physics and other areas of science is probably quite young -we’ve got tremendous amounts of astonishing stuff to see. Same with music. Picking a random point, it must have seemed to people (in Western music) that Beethoven was the pinnacle of what was possible in music, having assimilated and extended everything from before, and completely opened up several news areas and avenues. But no. I hope people realize that’s just wrong. Just as wrong as it was when people thought it about Bach. Just listen to the explosion of musics of various sorts that happened in the 20th century. I think that this is true in any genre.

Cheers,

-cvj

Even with some bands I have followed for 10-15 years or more there is a sense they have run out of ideas and that they have done their best work. I recall some people like John Horgan in his book “The End of Science” makes a similar argument for the sciences in that the best and most important stuff has already been done and discovered. Not so sure about that though.

By the way, it is also not original to observe that your observation that “music now is bad and what we thought was bad before from our youth is now good” is probably little to do with the music and more to do with nostalgia. I suspect that it is at least as good, if not better, on average. Also, several of the songwriters who wrote in those days also write for lots of the Britney’s, etc, now. It’s just that the production values change. Strip that away, and you find that the songs are not that different, by and large. But yes, I’d like to pretend that it was better back then too.

Cheers,

-cvj

1. There is a very active news forum at http://pub3.ezboard.com/bthehomegroundandkatebushnewsandinfoforum.

2. There is a news and information site at http://homepage.eircom.net/~twoms/katebush.htm.

When I was in high school I was very much into classical music, though I also professed to like jazz, while knowing next to nothing about it. Come to think of it, this is still pretty much the case. Most of the music I glommed onto that falls outside this description can be traced to the tastes of old roommates. For example, I had a roommate who was really into folk, especially some of the crossover stuff that combined different folk traditions, which is why I have a number of albums by Touchstone and New Grass Revival and obscure (to Americans, anyway) Scottish bands. I have an REM album that I trace back to a woman who was my roommate in the summer of 1985; I remember very little about her except for her obsession with the band, and the way she would go to clubs to hear them wearing a flowered dress and a big pink hat, the better to stand out in the primarily black-clad audience — an effective tactic for getting to know the band.

And I associate Kate Bush very specifically with my old housemate Bob, who liked her despite the fact that he considered her to be “pop.” One of the things that impressed me about Bush was the subject matter she would take on, that she didn’t just sing as herself — to me she has a sort of bardic, even impersonal quality, at least in the small part of her output that I’m familiar with.

Mark: So did you spill your beverage? Funnily enough, in my old age I’m now fondly remembering all the cheesy 80s stuff I used to avoid. I keep playing Madness in my car, for some reason. Feels very ironic.

Adam: The antidote: Just enjoy them two in a row and then put soemthing else on. It does not matter how you enjoy her music, just do it however works.

-cvj

Being at about the same age as Kate Bush, I have a very vivid memory of hearing her first single as a teenager.

A great (slightly outdated) source for Kate Bush fans is GaffaWeb at http://gaffa.org/.