AfterHours
Gender: Male
Location: originally from scaruffi.com ;-)
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- #32
- Posted: 04/29/2017 23:01
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Scaruffi makes all the necessary points about it:
The first long-play album, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn (Tower, 1967), which came out in the summer of 1967, had a huge impact on the music scene in Great Britain. In this album, Pink Floyd summarized their new musical grammar, a new mode of interpreting music towards the youth. The album was dominated by the personality of Barrett, an excellent storyteller and intrepid navigator of the stars, with an idyllic voice and demonic guitar. The intermittent radio signal that was Astronomy Domine was the greatest invention within English rock during this period: bliss in crescendo, intervals of hissing and throbbing from the guitars, and a voice deformed by astronomical distances. This was the manifestation of an extension to the ordinary meaning of psychedelia. It was both an expansion and liberation where the sky was the only limit, and Barrett would go even beyond. Wright and Mason, with their long notes, stormy and vast, invented a new style of accompaniment. Half of the album consisted of short surreal songs, free from the influence of hallucinogens such as See Emily Play, in which eccentric lyricism and space-rock instrumentals coexist. There were other miniature fantasies and harmonic syntheses, full of sound gaffes and mysterious lyrics. The guitar continued to create an atmosphere of panic, as in Lucifer Sam, a mix of a thriller sound track, a tribal dance, and an exorcism by black magic. The ballad was another form used with alienating effects in Matilda Mother, martial and fatalistic, which soared upon a heavenly chorus, and The Gnome, one of the group's most catchy refrains, was a classical fairytale. The most serious aspect of Barrett's psychedelia was documented in Chapter 24, which adapted raga-rock to cosmic arrangements (gags which took on many forms, such as suspense & dilated organ), and in Power R Toc H, the sabbath which announced the fierce instrumental vein of the group (like classical piano attacked by a bunch of drugged tribesmen, a sudden acceleration of time, celestial breaks by the organ, and haunting sounds of the woodlands).
In the end, the vaudeville style was the inspiration for Flaming (a collage of sound effects) and The Bike, a surreal sketch, a drunken prank consisting of random noise (sirens, cuckoo clocks, bells, bass drums, rusty chains, and animal sounds), revealing the insanity of Barrett, the goliard. Introduced by one of the most terrifying guitar riffs in the history of rock, Interstellar Overdrive (a long instrumental track), was a masterpiece inside a masterpiece. A synthesis of subliminal messages from gurus and acid priests, streams of consciousness a' la James Joyce & science fiction, of surrealism, and of Freudian psychoanalysis; the entire suite is a chameleon-like frenzy on which Barrett more violently abandoned the role of dissonant minstrel (psychedelic variation of a folk-singer), of metaphysical jester, of novice guru, and took on the role of cosmic musician. The framework for the group's tonal music crashed into the deafening chaos of free improvisation. Abandoning melody, the old excuse for instrumental tricks, the tricks now held their own. Every instrument lived free, possessed and deformed by the intensity of performance. The cosmic sense provided by the galactic beep on the guitar, celestial pulses on the bass, loud bangs on the drums, electrical shocks by the cymbals, and above all the spatial noise of the keyboard; the instruments changed roles, chasing each other and overlapping, but there was always one instrument which simulated spatial noises such as radio signals, whizzing spaceships, whistles and rumbles that come and go along stellar orbits, and primordial chaos which supported everything.
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