“Under Ice” is the second song of The Ninth Wave, Kate Bush’s suite of songs which makes up the second half of her album Hounds of Love. We left off last time at the end of “And Dream of Sheep”, where our narrator has drifted into sleep while floating in the sea at night, alone: a dangerous situation indeed. We heard the sound of wind howling as that song faded out, and this carries over into the start of “Under Ice”. It’s meant to represent the transition from waking consciousness into a dream, and this song is the dream itself. It’s notably the shortest song in the entire suite, but it packs a chilly punch.
Our narrator is dreaming about skating on a frozen river, with no-one else around, in a snowy, frost-bitten landscape. The lyrics at first show wonder at the beauty of the surroundings she finds herself in, but towards the end things take a decidedly horrific turn. The atmosphere of the track is ominous and unsettling from the off – almost like being in a dream yourself, where you’re not sure if it’s a nightmare or not.
Musically, the song is built on stiff string sounds and stern vocals with stacked harmonies, building as the song progresses towards its horror-movie-sting ending. The bass line, which sounds as if it’s played on a cello, cycles between a handful of notes — A, C, F, and D — while synthesiser strings ornament over the top in patterns of parallel fifths, an open texture commonly used in folk music because of its simplicity. These open fifths have a certain austere effect, almost primal in their elemental sound. There’s a sense of foreboding immediately.
At the same time, the song has an operatic feel about it due to the high-drama atmosphere and the restrained delivery. The vocals, handled entirely by Bush and her brother Paddy, read almost like a piece of choral music, or a chant. They deliver quick, pithy lines of imagery, and the lyrics are almost free-associative, as in a dream. The voices move homophonically – that is, each harmony has the same rhythm as the main vocal and they move in time with each other.
Starting from the beginning: The song opens with just the bass string. It starts off slow, and then speeds up to the tempo that the rest of the song will be at. As it does so, a wash of string notes appears, hovering in the background as a drone for the rest of the song. It feels like elements of a dream materialising themselves out of the ether. Once the tempo is established, the synth strings come in, sharply accenting over the steady, propulsive bass line. After this introduction, we hear the first lyrics:
It’s wonderful
Everywhere, so white
Our narrator – or rather, her dream self – is marvelling at her snowy surroundings, the ubiquity of the snow as it covers every surface, its uniformity, the pure whiteness of it. In dreams, snow can symbolise a number of things, from inner peace to purity, to change and upheaval, to turmoil and loneliness. I’m gonna go with the loneliness interpretation here, as she is currently alone in the sea (as well as alone in the dream), and the interpretation about change – the experience our narrator has over the course of The Ninth Wave is certainly a life-altering one. Ice is a bit more direct in its meaning: in dreams it stands for difficulty, danger, and a feeling of stuckness. Conversely, dreaming of ice skating represents being able to navigate difficult situations and escape danger, which would seem to be at odds with what’s happening at this point in the story. Perhaps it’s a glimmer of hope that our narrator might survive her ordeal, here at the beginning of it. Maybe it’s a good omen.
The river has frozen over
Not a soul on the ice
Only me, skating fast
This illustrates the complete isolation of our narrator’s dream self, which is of course a reflection of her physical self at this moment, stranded in the ocean. Bush describes the setting of this dream as “the visual expectancy of total loneliness”, highlighting that there’s an edge to this experience that could just be about wonder and awe. There’s something freeing about skating alone on ice, but there’s also a danger – if something were to go wrong, no-one is around to help you. We get the sense that something is already starting to go wrong here.
After ‘skating fast’, we hear a haunting two-note call from a male voice, in the distance, a call which could be coming from within the dream or from outside it. The reason it sounds so eerie is because the notes the voice is calling in are dissonant in the context of the rest of the music. Taking place during an A chord, the notes sung are F# and D#, the latter being a tritone away from the tonic note. The tritone has a certain reputation for being particularly dissonant, and was been referred to by some rather more pious classical musicians as ‘the devil’s interval’, or diabolus in musica. It was considered so distasteful to use this interval in classical music, especially sacred church music, that up until the 18th Century it was pretty much avoided entirely. (Parallel fifths are a somewhat controversial subject in classical music too, by the way.) Its reputation for being unnerving and disharmonious is used to great effect in this song, however. And we’ll get onto the topic of the devil next time.
I’m speeding past trees
Leaving little lines in the ice
Cutting out little lines
In the ice, splitting, splitting sound
Silver heels spitting, spitting snow
In this section of the song, Bush uses wonderfully evocative language where the sound of the words themselves contribute to the atmosphere. The attack of ‘in the ice’, the sibilants and consonances of ‘splitting’ and ‘spitting’, all have a decidedly icy effect to the ear. The language is almost onomatopoeic in the way it illustrates the movement of our narrator skating and the way the ice is carved by the skates. The vocal harmonies start to build, driving the tension upwards.
At ‘splitting sound’, we hear a clip of what sounds like a calving glacier, breaking off of the main body and crashing into the sea. If you’ve ever watched one of the many videos on YouTube of glaciers calving, you’ll know that they make a pretty spectacular sound as well as being spectacular to watch. In the dream, the ice is cracking – and this is the point at which the song starts to turn from childlike wonder to abject horror.
There’s something moving under
Under the ice
Moving under ice
Through water
The vocal harmonies continue to build. Our narrator sees something, she doesn’t know what, moving underneath the surface of the ice in the water below. We hear the sound of a submarine sonar, a device which uses sound waves for navigation, ranging, and locating objects underwater. This sound could be referring to the object under the ice which she is trying to locate, or it could represent a submarine in the real world trying to locate her in waking reality, who is also in the water.
And then comes the horrifying realisation:
It’s me
She realises that the thing under the ice is herself, drowning.
Trying to get out of the cold water
(It’s me)
If she was feeling awe before, then this is the other side of it: The original meaning of the word awe was terror or dread — you can see how ‘awe-ful’ easily becomes ‘awful’, which is what we now use.
Our narrator’s dream self has encountered her physical-world self, who is trying to get out of the water – as I’m sure she’d like to get out of the water in real life. But she cannot help her other self as she is trapped beneath the ice.
‘It’s me’ is also something you say when you’re trying to let someone know who you are, particularly when they’re in distress or confused. This was what I originally thought the line meant before I did my research into this song. But the meaning Bush describes of it literally being the narrator herself in the water is a lot more chilling — if you’ll pardon the pun. Encountering a different version of yourself in a dream could easily be interpreted as an encounter with the shadow self, who represents an aspect of the personal unconscious which is frightening or repulsive to the individual. And our narrator is certainly frightened to see herself under the ice.
Something
(It’s me)
Someone – help them
The final ‘it’s me’ is a long wail which sustains well into the song’s outro, morphing into an open vowel and descending in pitch as the other voices disappear and the cello slows down again.
The song ends with around 20 seconds of a low droning voice and glassy harmonic overtones from a synth going up and down. It’s undeniably creepy, and leaves us feeling unsure about what exactly has happened, how the dream has turned out. Has she drowned?
We’ll find out next time, when we enter the fire and brimstone of “Waking the Witch”.
A bonus video, for the Nintendo fans out there:
i had not considered “awe-full” and awful as connected. that’s a big deal. i am reminded of how many choices we have in any moment and the wide variety of results that can stem from awe.
Have you heard the @onbeing interview with Dacher Keltner? He wrote AWE: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. I don’t recommend the book but the interview draws out enough science. The relationship between cues from trees (for instance) and our receptor sites...amazing 🌱