QUIET STORMS
Ten early ambient classics
The textural passages of synthesiser that punctuate Shine On You Crazy Diamond were a high-profile early example of what was later defined as ‘ambient’ music.
Here are 10 further preliminary stages of the evolution of ambient.
Miles Davis In A Silent Way (1969) Davis seemed in a state of permanent evolution as the 60s melted into the 70s. Moments before inventing fusion with Bitches Brew, Davis and producer Teo Macero assembled this dreamy, star-gazing beauty.
Terry Riley A Rainbow In Curved Air (1969) A monumental release, its title track – composed from overdubbed tambourine, harpsichord and goblet drum, replayed at altered speeds – was at once busy and trancelike, and rewarded whatever level of listening was invested.
Tangerine Dream Rubycon (1975) Having conquered space-rock with Zeit earlier in the decade, Edgar Froese and his fellow psychonauts pledged allegiance to minimalism with this two-track volume, an exercise in doing very little, but as fascinatingly as possible.
Ernest Hood
Neighborhoods
(1975)
Composed for synthesiser and zither, the unhurried suburban soundscapes of this once-obscure curio from jazz guitarist Hood conjured the magic of endless, unhurried childhood afternoons.
Fripp & Eno Evening Star (1975) Eno would coin the genre’s name with his later series of ‘Ambient’ releases, but it was his pioneering work with Crimson godhead Fripp and his electronically manipulated guitars (Frippertronics) that marked his earliest experiments with the sound.
Jon Hassell Vernal Equinox (1977) Eno collaborator and, later, pioneer of “fourth world” music, Hassell was a fearless imagineer exploring inner space. This trancelike work hums with activity, like a jungle at twilight, but calm is its dominant mood.
Laraaji Ambient 3: Day Of Radiance (1980) Discovered by Eno while playing his zither in New York’s Washington Square Park, Day Of Radiance committed those performances to tape, rejoicing in the space and vibe of Laraaji’s inventive approach to the instrument.
JD Emmanuel Wizards (1982) Describing himself as a “timetraveller”, Texan synth experimentalist Emmanuel immersed himself in the work of Philip Glass, Terry Riley and Steve Reich before coining a supremely meditative electronic voice of his own.
Laurie Spiegel The Expanding Universe (1980) “Music isn’t verbal or conceptual,” wrote composer Spiegel on the sleeve of these dreamy synthesiser treatises, composed during downtime from her dayjob as a graphics programmer at Bell Laboratories.
Steve Roach Structures From Silence (1984) As the title suggests, new age/trance pioneer Roach’s early triumph revelled in the economy of his synthesiser compositions. Still, it’s amazing how emotional these exercises in negative sonic space could feel.
which ran for 12 or so minutes, simmered with violence, opening with Waters howling, “Raving and drooling / I fell on his neck with a scream,” and later found him growling, “How does it feel / To be empty and angry and spaced?” The second track ran for 18 minutes, built around a fast-strummed acoustic guitar figure that channelled Pete Townshend’s dynamic, iconic thrash from The Who’s Pinball Wizard. But where on that song the guitar was a touchpaper waiting to be lit, awaiting catharsis, You’ve Got To Be Crazy established a sense of stasis, that strum ebbing away to be replaced by more contemplative, almost navel-gazing passages. Gilmour took the lead vocals this time, barking of compromises made, pressures withstood, wounds sustained in the transition to adulthood, in the perpetuation of their musical career. “You gotta keep one eye over your shoulder / Gonna get harder as you get older,” he muttered. “You gotta keep drinking / You gotta eat shit.” Waters took over vocals for a second section, but the narrator’s situation did not improve: “Have a good drown as you go down / All alone / Dragged by the stone.”
As they had with the Dark Side material, Pink Floyd took their unheard new songs on tour for a road test. A seven-date trip across France saw the group run through Dark Side in its entirety, while also debuting Shine On... and Raving And Drooling. In the autumn, they travelled across the UK, adding You’ve Got To Be Crazy to the setlist. But while the Dark Side material had been greeted with acclaim on its debut run, these new songs received the cold shoulder from a crucial corner when the group played Wembley Empire Pool in November. NME critic Nick Kent unloaded with both barrels: “The lyrics are not very good,” he wrote of Shine On…, “like sixthform poetry – prissy, selfconscious and pretentious… The song is for and about Syd Barrett. He could have deserved better.” Raving And Drooling was, Kent wrote, “pretty undistinguished stuff”, while he lambasted the show overall as “utterly morose laziness” and “a pallid excuse for creative music”.
So, the mood within the group wasn’t great when they entered Abbey Road on Monday 6 January 1975, to begin recording what became Wish You Were Here. Sessions would continue until late in the summer, with occasional breaks for tours across the US in April and June. Further ructions soon arose over the content for the new album. Gilmour wanted the band to record all the new material they’d debuted on the tour; Waters, however, wanted to park Raving and Crazy, and further explore the themes of Shine On…. “There were huge arguments over what should be on it,” Waters remembered to Andy Gill in 2004. “I had a clear vision of what the album should be.”
Waters had a concept in mind – “absence” – and Raving and Crazy didn’t fit. The theme applied to Syd, obviously, but also to the remaining band themselves. Waters said he had to make the album “relate to what was going on there and then – the fact that no one was really looking each other in the eye, and that it was all very mechanical”. Later, he’d remark that the album should have been called Wish We Were Here, a comment on this absence and distraction within the band. The reasons for this lack of focus within the band weren’t hard to divine; they were older now, they had children and other responsibilities. Waters’ marriage had just hit the skids; Mason’s was in serious trouble. The musicians’ punctuality became an issue, and when they were all in the studio together, it was never long before someone succumbed to the siren call of the dartboard, the air-rifle or the squash court.
“We didn’t split up, because we were frightened of the great ‘out there’,” Waters later grumbled, “outside the umbrella of this extraordinarily powerful and valuable trade name, Pink Floyd.” Waters’ clear desire during these sessions to end the group gave him a lot of power in the game of control over the band. “Avoid confrontation and don’t rock the boat” was Mason’s chosen tactic. “Because if we did, everything might explode and the band would disappear, which was not what I wanted.”
It was Waters’ idea to open the album with half of the Shine On… suite, and close it with the other half. Two of the remaining three songs would reflect Waters’ growing cynicism over the music industry. Welcome To The Machine was born in the studio, centring around the throb of a VCS3 portable analogue synthesiser and Gilmour’s treated vocal, reading Waters’ typically dystopian lyrics to establish an impermeable mood of alienation. Have A Cigar added a little humour to the cocktail, its gloomy and unfriendly funk leavened by strychnine vocals from Roy Harper, who was recording his own masterpiece, HQ, next door. The title track, an uncharacteristically light moment on a mostly heavy record, was, Gilmour later said, “a very simple country song” that reconnected with the themes of loss and absence that guided the album’s grand suite.
The greatness of Shine On… was such that it couldn’t help but overshadow the rest of the
“His eyes were the same... everything else was different” – David Gilmour on Syd Barrett
record. The band worked hard to make it as good as it was, negotiating serious technical problems (at least one full take was junked after an indelible echo had somehow become attached to the tracks) and the limitations of Roger Waters’ voice. The song was at the edge of the bassist’s modest vocal range, and he was unable to sing the lyric in a single take. Indeed, executing the melody taxed his voice so much that he ended up recording each line of the song separately, over and over, until he’d nailed it.
Once all the tracks had been recorded, fate had one final surprise in store for the members of Pink Floyd, a twist that would feel too farfetched if it had been fiction. The group were one of the few of their generation who took an active role in the mixing of their albums; rather than farm out the chore to the mixing engineer, they liked to sit and advise on the process, and maybe add a final little element at the last moment (it was this sort of attention to detail that prompted them to slip the melody from early Floyd single and Barrett showcase See Emily Play into the fade-out of Shine On…).
As the group worked on the final mix of the album’s epic piece, they were joined by a mysterious, obese, shaved-bald figure no one seemed to recognise. “It was quite normal for strangers to wander into our sessions,” Wright later remarked. This particular stranger, however, punctuated the process with strikingly unusual behaviour: lurking in the shadows, absolutely silent, and then suddenly standing up and brushing his teeth.
Waters nudged the keyboard player and told him the stranger was Barrett. The shock was palpable for all the members of Pink
Floyd, most of whom hadn’t seen their absent leader for six years. They were all moved to tears. “His eyes were the same,” observed Gilmour. “Everything else was different.” As the session wore on, Barrett turned to his erstwhile bandmates and asked, “Right, when do I put the guitar on?” Wright told him, “Sorry, the guitar’s all done.” Barrett exited the room soon afterwards; Pink Floyd never saw him again.
“It’s incredible he picked the very day we were doing a song about him, and we hadn’t seen him for years,” marvelled Wright, years later. “Coincidence? Karma? Fate? Who knows. But it was very, very powerful.”
Wish You Were Here was released 12 September 1975; debuting atop the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, and it was swiftly acclaimed as a masterpiece. The sense of triumph was relatively short-lived, however. The process of making the album had forced the members of the group to acknowledge that they were no longer the democratic unit they’d been conceived as – Roger Waters had wrested creative control of the group amid the disarray of the album’s production and would not relinquish those reins until his own exit eight years later. He regarded Dark Side as the group’s “last willing collaboration” and bemoaned the creative absence of the bandmates he’d arguably bullied away by taking control of the project.
They would continue to enjoy commercial and (to a lesser extent) critical success on some of the albums that followed – Animals, The Wall – but these would prove largely joyless experiences for the musicians who recorded them. “I went through long periods when I wouldn’t talk to anybody,” Waters acknowledged to the LA Times’ Richard Cromelin in 1992. “I may have been a little hard on people sometimes in the past. I still don’t suffer fools gladly. I’m not a big softy.”
Indeed. The other members of Pink Floyd would ruminate upon the bruising experience of making Wish You Were Here for years to come. “It was a struggle,” admitted Mason. “It was a pretty confusing and empty time,” added Gilmour. “But I, for one, would have to say that it’s my favourite album.”
After living the rest of his life in obscurity and never again troubling a recording studio, Barrett passed away on 7 July 2006 of pancreatic cancer, aged 60. No members of Pink Floyd attended his cremation, though the loss was surely keenly felt by all four surviving members. Gilmour later confessed his regret over observing Syd’s family’s wishes not to impinge on the onetime rock star’s reclusive life in Cambridge, where he lived in his mother’s house.
“I should have gone down there, knocked on his door and said, ‘Hey, let’s go for a pint,” Gilmour said in 2017. “Because we were friends. I can’t see that seeing an old friend would have done any damage.”
See www.sydbarrettfilm.com for information about the documentary, Have You Got It Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett And Pink Floyd. Animals 2018 Remix – Dolby Atmos is out on Blu-ray and compatible digital platforms on 17 May. Collector’s Edition of The Dark Side Of The Moon is on crystal clear vinyl. See p43 for Pink Floyd back issue offer. Discography overleaf ®