Voice work: phonographic musicking in Kate Bush’s The Dreaming (1982)

This chapter examines Kate Bush’s early digital voice work on her album The Dreaming from 1982. I do this not primarily to discuss Bush’s versatile and unique production methodology but rather to ask more generally about the phonographic constitution of the voice as it musicks. Through a close listening of The Dreaming, I argue, Bush’s voice can be heard as musical material in experimentation. The voice in music posits a problem to any essentialist understandings of voice (where voice is indexical of a singular physical body or identity). Throughout The Dreaming, Bush famously made extensive use of early digital sampling technologies, most notably the Fairlight CMI. The voice that results from this experimental treatment is dis/assembled, multiple, artificial, generative. But rather than theorise technology’s alteration of this voice as an external factor, Bush here seems to be interested in the voice’s inherent strangeness, what she calls “the difference in my voice”. I argue, by way of deconstructive theories of phonography (Derrida, Weheliye, Moten), that the voice that is put to work here in Kate Bush’s music is not simply a technologically constructed voice and made artificial through digital media technology. Instead, what Bush’s voice work reveals is that any voice that musicks is already inherently phonographic.