Pink Floyd, The Dark Side Of The Moon, Immersion set

PFDSOTMIE

PFDSOTMIE

Pink Floyd, The Dark Side Of The Moon, Immersion set – I’m a sucker for this sort of thing… and not only is Dark Side of the Moon one of my favourite all-time releases, I really really love box sets! This is one of the very good ones, as it comes with all sorts of goodies, with three regular CD recordings, audio and video on DVD, and audio and video on Blu-Ray, presenting all together ten different versions of the classic album in different formats and different mixes (CD, DVD and Blu-Ray). The sound part of the box include the regular release, a 1974 concert of The Dark Side of the Moon, and extra audio tracks that are linked to the release – this is a hodge podge that includes an early mix by Alan Parsons of the whole album, a song from the abandoned post-Dark Side of The Moon project “Household Objects”, and various live sequences that bridged album songs but are not on the album, along with an early demo of “Money” with Roy Harper singing. The video material shows two pre-Dark Side of the Moon songs performed live (hodge-podge territory again here – it’s “Careful With That Axe, Eugene” and “Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun”), a 25-minute documentary on the recording of Dark Side of the Moon, as well as the concert screens (animation, colours, patterns) shown at parts of the concert, but changed for various tours; three tours are shown here – the British Tour of 1974, the French tour of 1974, and the North American tour of 1975. Groovy.

Music review

Dark Side of the Moon (original release) (42 minutes long) – The 1972 release with the pretentious themes (life, death, war, money) is a truly insane recording, starting off with heartbeats (“Speak To Me”), pop (“Breathe In The Air”), nutty dogfight and plane crash sequences a la electronica (“On The Run”), weird booming bass and clock sounds and rock (“Time”), a long WHOOOOAH-WOOOOOOOOAHHH-WOOOOOOAHHHHHH gospel piece that mimics the last minutes of life (“The Great Gig in the Sky”) as the continuous tapestry of the first side. The second side gives the “Time” treatment to the concept of money (“Money”) with sound effects, and then rock, lovely piano bits that also soar in a song about the madness of war (“Us and Them”), the weird synthesizer bridge “Any Colour You Like” (also the longest track on the album), the guitar pop of “Brain Damage”, and finally the sweeping crescendo of “Eclipse” and its chants. The most complex piece on the album is “Time”, with its sound effects, booming bass, and three-part act that ends with… magic… and leads into the haunting wordless threnody. I listen to the album constantly and am not sick of it. But I’ve never owned my own copy, which makes this the right time to buy it and in the right and complete form. Unfortunately, curiosity in the additional bits is only that, and they neither truly improve or supplement the pleasures that the album itself holds.

The Dark Side of the Moon live at Wembley, 1974 (55 minutes long) – As the album fades in with “Speak To Me”, the live version introduces new sounds, a voice sample, and other strange noises, ticking clocks (to hint at “Time”, which is to come later), ghostly voices come in, and finally… “Breathe In The Air”, which has new guitar parts. David Gilmour sings it more gruffly and huskily than it is on the recording. Being a live concert, there’s no need to take a break between sides, and before “The Great Gig In The Sky” is over, you already hear the coins of “Money” coming in, and the song takes off. In “Us and Them”, the echo is provided by the backup singers, a bit cagey. “Any Colour You Like” goes off very differently than the studio version, sounding at times very Tangerine Dream-like, but with a bit of a drum beat. Great big long spacey guitar meander.

Most of the songs, especially the instrumental bits, are longer live (this means “Speak To Me”, “On The Run” and “The Great Gig In The Sky”, while “Any Colour You Like” is more than twice as long), as are “Money” and “Us And Them.

Extra audio tracks – First up is the original and early mix, which is 40 minutes long. The 1972 early mix of Dark Side of the Moon by Alan Parsons is largely the same as the final product, although sounding a bit rougher with some of the transitions and drum fills feeling unfamiliar. The initial “Speak To Me” intro is appended to some simple sound effects that only last 25 minutes, rather than the slow, silent heartbeat buildup that lasts just over one minute. “Breathe In The Air” sounds like the final version, albeit a bit stripped down, with the odd extra sound to it. The transition to “On The Run” is stark and doesn’t sound very well-mixed, but the track is very similar to the final version, except slightly shorter and perhaps with more emphasis on the running sounds, more airplane sounds, fewer voices, and no spectacular plane crash at the end, just a simple blend into “Time”, which sounds the same, albeit the chiming clocks at the intro are less intense and dramatic. The biggest difference in the recording is the absence of Clare Torry (and the final version’s sound samples) from “The Great Gig in the Sky”; here she is replaced by the voice of Neil Armstrong’s speech from the moon. While it sounds odd for people like me who have listened to Dark Side of the Moon hundreds of times, but it does give a nice opportunity to concentrate a bit more on the instrumental bits that were blasted to pieces by Torry’s splendid wailing! The new arrangement with Torry also lengthened the track, probably due to the passion and sophistication of Torry’s composition. “Money” is fairly faithful to the final mix, although it is half a minute shorter, with the final bit containing some slightly different guitar parts. “Us And Them” is also very different from the final version, being much more a duet between piano and saxophone, with an extended intro. It is nearly a minute shorter than the final version. Weird vocal echoing in the mix, much different from the final version in the “Up… and down” verse. In “Brain Damage”, the manic laughter is different, and in this case highly fake-sounding and annoying, like some hellish circus clown trying to drive someone insane; it enters the song at two points. The final version is way better. It is the only really startling thing about this mix. “Eclipse” has a guitar part on it that is not used in the final, where the pounding vocals are supremely high in the mix.

After Alan Parson’s early mix of Dark Side of the Moon, there’s a mish-mash of various songs and fragments, all instrumental until the last track, a demo of “Money” with Roy Harper, rather than Roger Waters, singing. “The Hard Way”, not really part of the Dark Side of the Moon project at all, is a trippy blend of hand claps and deep bass boogie, augmented later by spooky percussive and chiming sounds and echoing chatter, really trippy. The band wanted to make a whole album of sounds produced by household objects, if every song had come out like this one it would have really worked! But I understand that they only really laid down two songs (the other one is on the Wish You Were Here box) before they moved on to other things. Although it doesn’t really belong here, it’s nice that it was included. “Us And Them” is a light piano piece by Richard Wright from the Zabriskie Point film project that was never released as a soundtrack, it’s sweet but a little boring, and the ear strains to hear the brilliant vocals in the final album version. “The Travel Sequence” is echoey guitar that sounds more like something from The Wall than of this era, although there’s a little bit of jazz keyboard and piano there too. Nice jam. “The Mortality Sequence” sounds like an intro to “Us And Them”, but with more droning keyboard sounds, and new voice samples, such as an invocation from a priest, or someone speaking in a hospital. It goes into the sound of clinking coins, possibly as a setup to Money. “Any Colour You Like” is there too, from a live show in Berlin, but it’s baffling that they’d include just a fragment of a whole concert – where’s the rest of the show? What was so special about this short version of the classic cut from Dark Side of the Moon? It sounds great, but it also leaves you hanging. “The Travel Sequence” is jazzy, poppy instrumental funk with some swelling electronic burbles. Finally, the demo of “Money” with Roy Harper singing is interesting, as are the prototype money sounds that the song puts just after the middle, very different, of course, from the final version.

The set also comes with an audio-only DVD that contains five mixes: 5.1 Surround, 448kbps (2003), 5.1 Surround, 640kbps (2003), LPCM Stereo (1973), 4.0 Quad 448kbps (1973) and 4.0 Quad 640kbps (1973). I listened to them all in a full surround sound version, it was good fun. And loud! I liked the Quad mixes the best.

Video review

The live songs – In “Careful With That Axe, Eugene”, Roger Waters has the main role, firing up his bass and cooing the strange tics and howls of a madman, playing with a burning cigarette in the strings at the head of his bass, howling evilly, very scary whispering and cackling through a toothy, tight-lipped grin, great keyboard swells, fires ablaze, smoke pots burning. In “Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun”, Waters sings without playing bass, then at the crescendo of the song he dons the bass but doesn’t play it. Smashes the gong again, it burns around the edges! Waters plays bass finally, and then the live video breaks into nature scenes, for some reason: scenes of lava, golden ripcurls, etc.

The documentary – Mainly going song-for-song throughout the album with explanation and discussion, the four band members talking about what went on during the recording sessions for Dark Side of the Moon. “On The Run” is about the fear of death, the fear of flying, with Roger’s lyrics finally really coming of age as they discuss the pressures of life. Mature themes. Rick Wright explains that “The Great Gig In The Sky” goes from B minor through a series of changes, to finally end in B flat. No mention of Clare Torry at all (she had sued for co-songwriting credits and settled out of court, they probably don’t like her very much any more)! Waters descries his potter wife’s metal mixing bowl and how he put a mic and coins in the mixing bowl to get the sounds at the beginning of “Money”. Describes weird process, and then says “and that was it”, as if it was all very easy to do. “It was a dream fulfilled”, he says about the album, noting that if the band had any guts, they would have called it a day right there (and not produced Wish You Were Here, Animals or The Wall, of course). “But it’s a good thing we didn’t, because out of all the anxieties and enmities that were left in the rubble of the explosion and all the success [of Dark Side of the Moon] came all sorts of wounded creatures that had their own stories to tell.” Roger Waters hadn’t listened to Dark Side of the Moon in 20 years until this mix, but says he’s very happy with it (of course). Wright notes that “Us and Them” stands the test of time better than others, on account of what it can say about “this punitive war in Iraq.” There’s also an interview with Storm Thorgerson, who designed the iconic cover of the album, with him telling the tale of coming up with several ideas for the cover, but anyone who looked at them was immediately drawn to the prism and there was no discussing any of the other ideas – much to Thorgerson’s frustration. I wonder what they were, though, the band and everyone else is very silent on the topic (they must be around here somewhere… of course Thogerson may have also recycled them for other groups’ album covers over the years). Then he goes to explain how he did the various other covers for the re-releases over the years, etc.

The onstage screen visuals These are somewhat interesting, and there are clips of the films that were played together with the live performance of songs during three various tours: British Tour 1974 (six clips, 16:16), French Tour 1974 (seven clips, 18:27) and North America Tour 1974 (seven clips, 23:45). For the British Tour 1974, the videos open up with animated and beat-driven spectrum-influenced animation. the colours seem burned away and not crisp. There’s an exploding bookshelf, TV, fridge – which results in a flying chicken carcass. The French Tour of 1974 favoured fire, and has video for “The Great Gig In The Sky” showing a priest, then a burning cross. There’s an unusual clip here for “Assorted Lunatics”, which is just a sound collage of the spoken bits already familiar on the album, and then there’s solar flares for “Eclipse.” In the North America Tour of 1975, there’s more literal interpretation, with an ambulance, hospital hall, surgery, and scared eyes. While Clare Torry is singing, there are crashing waves, with some spectacular sun-through-lip-of-water shots. “Money” has a naked model and scenes of the old and the poor to juxtapose decadent wealth and youth with crushing poverty and age. There are also weird slow motions scenes of a squad of office workers walking down the street, their bodies twisting to a strange rhythm, scenes also of their pant cuffs and shoes moving in rubbery half-step.

The box set also comes with a Blu-Ray disc that contains all of the audio visual material, along with the five mixes found on a DVD in this set.

Packaging

One of the main points about Pink Floyd is packaging – lyrics sheets, gatefolds, big images, colours, design, architecture, it’s all there. This has it all too. To describe what you get it is:

- the box, which is heavy and durable and big enough to contain LPs, although it doesn’t contain LPs
- three marbles in a black velvet sack: the over-sized marbles show the endless circle of the white light becoming its six colours through one pyramid, and then re-melding into white light through another. Groovy… there are three people in my family, so I feel that this is special; if I collect the three Immersion sets (Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, The Wall), I will have 3×3 marbles, how nice
- Disc 5 and disc 6 in their own cardboard cases (each disc has its own triangle/light design) with groovy triangle/light motifs on their covers, but each in its own concept. I like disc 6, with its Magritte splotch concept, very nice.
- a scarf that is 1.5 metres long, with the six colours/heartbeat (in the green zone of the red-yellow-orange-green-blue-violet spectrum), nice feel to it
- a 12-page grey booklet of credits
- an immersion “memorabilia” envelope, which contains a Pink Floyd Tour 1973 sticker, and a ticket stub for Friday, February 18th, the Rainbow Theatre, Astoria, Finsbury Park, London, seat A29, Block C, whatever that means.
- a series of nine beer coasters, with the letters P-I-N-K-F-L-O-Y-D, and nice illustrations on the other side
- an envelope containing four cards of a series of cards; I got numbers 7 (horse on head), 21 (airmen), 42 (sand swimmer) and 55 (echoes). They are also very nice.
- a giant A4-sized envelope with a hand-written card describing the process of gathering the ideas bandied about by about the voices on Dark Side of the Moon. Was it, perhaps, written by Alan Parsons?
- there’s a beautiful Dark Side of the Moon “Liechtenstein” lithograph (but… what’s a lithograph?)
- a beautiful 36-page that includes all things triangular and light-like, meaning that there’s the original cover of the album on the cover of the booklet, then there’s the lyrics and some pretty pictures, there’s some of the original images from the album release (band pictures, etc), and then some pics of Dark Side of the Moon-inspired automobiles, fashion, design, stained glass, word art, tour posters, real pyramids at Giza from many many views, and an essay on the album cover design by Storm Thorgerson.
- a 24-page booklet of photos of the band from that era, including the great Clare Torrey, who sang backup, and who took over “The Great Gig In The Sky”; pics taken from 1972-1974

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