Pink Floyd

“Go away, write ten minutes of music, and then we'll talk about it in the studio”. More or less, these were the words that an increasingly self-assured Waters — sure of himself and of the band — must have said to his fellow travelers, on the eve of one of their most artistically intense years. Try for a moment to picture the faces of Wright, notoriously lazy despite being a skilled composer, or of Gilmour, a recent arrival not yet used to writing songs entirely on his own. Mason, on the other hand, must have thought “this is my chance”, given that in the Pink Floyd discography, you wouldn't even need all the fingers of one hand to count the tracks credited to him alone. How can an album be born from such conflicting feelings, and how can this album rise to the status of a masterpiece and a cornerstone of such a long and celebrated career?

The experiment required over six months of gestation, yet that didn't stop the four musicians from taking on equally significant projects: it's the first half of 1969, and "A Saucerful of Secrets", their second album, has been out for a few months, meeting with more than modest success. Much to the chagrin of detractors who saw Pink Floyd as rudderless and without a future following the forced departure of Syd Barrett. During this period, the four, fresh off an English tour in which two unreleased suites, "The Man" and "The Journey", were performed for the first time and would go on to significantly influence the project at hand, threw themselves into the quick yet fortunate recording of "More", the soundtrack to the film of the same name, the directorial debut of actor and filmmaker Barbet Schroeder, an album unjustly underrated within the band's discography.

During the tour, the idea took shape to capture on record a few war horses from their still-young repertoire: the Barrett-penned "Astronomy Domine", "Careful With That Axe, Eugene", "Set the Controls For The Heart Of The Sun" and "A Saucerful Of Secrets". "We decided to record these tracks before dropping them for good, since live they'd changed considerably," explained Waters: true to Floydian tradition, the pieces are stretched out well beyond their studio versions and played with an instinct that reason often clips the wings of in more carefully planned studio sessions.

"Astronomy Domine", if anything, takes on an even more dreamlike, nocturnal quality than the version already admired on "The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn", with a longer, more rarefied central section.

The second track, "Careful With That Axe, Eugene", the only one of the four not drawn from the first two albums, opens with a bass line over which Wright's hypnotic organ immediately settles, before erupting into Waters' inhuman scream which, clearing the way for the other instruments, dissolves into an ending that quickly turns quiet, almost intangible.

Then comes "Set the Controls For The Heart Of The Sun", governed by Mason's percussion and Waters' voice, poetic and delicate as never before, also considerably "stretched" in its central section.

Closing out the live portion is "A Saucerful Of Secrets": unusual sounds emerge from Gilmour's guitar and Wright's keyboards, accompanied by Mason's drums, whose pace grows increasingly frenzied. A moment of silence marks the turning point, and the organ begins to trace an orderly melody with an almost ecclesiastical tone; the bass enters and a crescendo builds, culminating in Gilmour's vocals for a spine-tingling finale.

This closes out the first part of "Ummagumma" (slang for the sexual act), which is less an anthology than a genuine reworking in the band's new style, almost a statement of intent after a turbulent, unstable period.

Having shed their once carefree atmospheres, the band moved toward a more experimental, polished sound, a psychedelia that could well be called "geometric" as opposed to the "lysergic" psychedelia of the Barrett era.

The studio recording opens with Wright's instrumental piece, "Sysyphus", divided into four movements, in which the keyboardist doesn't betray his greatest passions: classical music and the avant-garde. The intro, at once dark and majestic, is in a sense the best possible lead-in to a stunning piano composition, alternating between atmosphere and improvisation; the third section leans decisively toward the latter, with the intrusion of sounds drawn from a mysterious animal world. The suite, structured cyclically, closes with a return to the opening theme.

The middle section of the record is given over to Waters and Gilmour, the band's creative souls, who step for the first time into the recording studio at Abbey Road's EMI Studios, under the supervision - in name only, it seems - of producer Norman Smith.

The bassist wrote two wildly different tracks: the acoustic "Grantchester Meadows", a ballad rich in poetry both in its lyrics (packed with alliteration and other elaborate semantic effects) and its atmosphere, and the noise-driven "Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict", featuring animal calls, overdub-derived effects, backward recordings, and Waters' own voice used as an onomatopoeic instrument.

Though traceable back to earlier albums ("More" and "The Piper At The Gates of Dawn", specifically), the two pieces shine with a light of their own, boasting a sound decidedly more mature and polished than the band's debut work.

Not without difficulty, Gilmour managed to bring "The Narrow Way" into being, a remarkable display of guitar prowess. As the guitarist recalls: "I was truly desperate, having never written anything before. I even called Roger to ask him to help me write the lyrics, but he said: 'Do it yourself!'" The piece, split into three sections, opens with an acoustic guitar intro, while the second part is marked by a clearly defined bass line, over which electric guitar and keyboard improvisations unfold. The third section makes an abrupt return to classic song form, with lyrics that are less than compelling (not by chance left out of the remaster's booklet), but with Gilmour's voice and the rest of the instruments on top form. This successful "first effort" gave the Pink Floyd of the early Seventies another valuable composer: Gilmour would soon deliver a splendid follow-up on the band's next album with the dreamlike "Fat Old Sun", for many years an acclaimed live favourite.

The album closes with Mason's unusual composition, "The Grand Vizier's Garden Party", built, unsurprisingly, around percussion. A delicate flute ushers in the piece, giving no hint of what awaits in the Grand Vizier's garden: the entertainment proceeds in bursts of tom-tom, while bizarre sounds of unknown origin occasionally intrude; it could almost pass for a post-rock track thirty years ahead of schedule. The same flute that opened the piece gently accompanies its exit and the album's close.

Upon release, "Ummagumma" was immediately met with highly positive reactions from music critics (many still consider it the band's creative peak to this day), while the public's response was more lukewarm, with underwhelming sales figures (the album failed to climb higher than number five in England, and only reached number seventy in a United States still far from being won over), despite the cover art, as ever spot-on, courtesy of Storm Thorgerson and the Hipgnosis studio.

Even now, the musicians themselves - rather reluctant to make self-congratulatory statements about the record - are the ones distancing themselves from it, convinced that more (!) could have been achieved by working together and blending their various inspired contributions.

“Ummagumma” nonetheless represents Pink Floyd's true turning point in the post-Barrett era and a milestone of all avant-garde music: quintessential masters of experimentation, and with this record increasingly in command of the technical side of production and mixing, the quartet would be acclaimed worldwide within a few years, with sounds that were more accessible yet still utterly unique. But that's a whole other story...

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05/11/2006