Friday, April 20, 2007

GREAT WORKS: Dark side of Life: The music narration of Pink Floyd

If I could choose an album among the albums of Pink Floyd it would be Dark Side of the Moon. It can easily be characterized as a monument of the qualities that a great album has. Lyrics talk about the journey of life. They talk about lost opportunities , great expectations , human emotional deficiency. The expression is surrealistic and the completeness of phrases and meanings is clearly of a poetic level.
But Lyrics are only one element that makes this album incomparable. The music is a balanced combination of melodic lines and psychedelic effects. Who can forget the bass of "Money"? Who doesn't tremble at the heartbeat in the intro? The instruments talk to each other and the effects are used as an instrument too merging into the melody and the rhythm. The bells and clocks in "Time " for example are part of the music as much as the guitar or the vocals. And this is something that Pink Floyd where capable of doing: making music from effects.
On a technical level the sound engineering knowledge of the members of the band combined with the mastering and mixing capabilities of a number of the best professional sound engineers of the last 30 years (including Alan Parsons) gives an album that is a hard test for every Hi-Fi system. This is especially true for the 30th anniversary edition SACD that elevates the experience of listening to a surrounding world of emotions and impressions. The sound is like never before unleashed from 5.1 speakers. Only the few lucky ones that posessed the original quadraphonic LP of 1973 and the appropriate sound system had the chance until before 3-4 years to experience something like this.
But albums like Dark side of the Moon do not need comments just someone to listen and experience them. Because they are exactly that: an experience that someone cannot forget.

1 comment:

Draugar6 said...

Pink Floyd are the gods of the '70s, fact that it is beyond doubt. At their older albums the band also created beautiful music with effects, but the genius of this album was in the point that Pink Floyd managed to make the breakthrough to a bigger audience, without making any compromise and without losing any element of their unique identity. This fact is confirming from that the
"Dark side of the moon" has sold more than 35 millions copies till today and stayed at the American charts for about 14 years. Incredible album with innumerable secrets, well hidden in it, which are waiting the listener to discover them.Simply MAGIC.