FERNEERL ERRRRRLBEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERM1. Pink Floyd – Dark Side Of The Moon (1973)
I know this probably comes across as a rather cliché choice, but this is, and probably always will remain, my favourite album of all time. Why? There are many things I love about this album, some music related and some just because they give me sentimental attachment to it. I guess this is the album which first got me to really appreciate music as art rather than that background noise that goes on. I guess the story really began when I was searching through the stack of old records my father kept behind the arm chair at home. Admittedly, I was just fascinated by the artworks on the covers and the black discs inside rather than what was contained on those discs. This one, I remember, was one of the more striking ones and it must have stuck in my mind.
A few months later, optics was being covered in science class (ah, back in year eight, probably just under eleven years ago now), and there was this picture in the textbook of this prism. The teacher was evidently a bit of a Pink Floyd fan and asked if anyone knew which album this was the cover to. It must have been the last week of term as I got chocolate for being the only person who had any idea, and I’m pretty sure it was in mid-summer.
Anyway, I went home and asked what this “Pink Floyd” thing sounded like, to which my father handed me the CD and just told me to sit in the front room and listen to it. I was instantly captivated by it. Music like this was something totally alien to me beforehand. There were no instant beginnings to songs, there were few defined boundaries between songs, even. There were huge changes in mood and sounds throughout, and no matter what sound was at the forefront, it all sounded so full and complete.
Before, I had never come across the idea of music using general sounds, like cash registers or even people talking, to give it another dimension, but that’s exactly what this album did. Since then, I have always been a fan of carefully placed samples to just enrich the music. It almost gives it a connection to the world around, rather than just being this thing which you are merely listening to. It is something which I personally feel causes me to feel completely absorbed into the music, and not merely observe it from afar.
It’s not just the samples, either. The haunting lap-steel guitars on Breathe and The Great Gig In The Sky make the most wonderful sounds. There’s this beautiful, ethereal quality to them which just feels like it adds this really fluid, yet chilling, feel to the music. It also reminded me of one of my favourite worlds in the first Spyro game, which was one of my favourites at the time.
Keyboards were another dimension to music I’d not really come across (despite taking keyboard lessons at the time), as most of the music I heard on the radio in my father’s car was very guitar based, to the point that the guitar was almost an uninteresting sound. However, I’d never come across the beautiful piano sounds, futuristic synthesizer sounds and almost ocean-like organ sounds which this album has. They just added this intrigue which I had not felt before in music. That’s not to say that I found the guitar sounds on this album to be uninteresting, because they really were not the sounds I was used to. I had not before encountered those full soloing tones, I had not encountered that languid tone which is found all over Breathe, this album just had an organic and natural feel I had not come across.
I ended up playing this album so very frequently afterwards, there must have been a period where I would listen to it twice, even three times a day, almost every day. This was something special. I found a friend of mine was also into Pink Floyd, a little while later, and so there came a period where whenever we bumped into each other, every sentence either of us spoke to each other would have either a Pink Floyd song title, album name or lyric hidden in it. Well, not really hidden, sometimes they would be the sentence.
My father’s old room at my grandparents’ house had this poster in it of four men with long hair in an outside environment. I’d always been fascinated by this poster and wondered what the hell it was from. Unfortunately, my grandmother had thrown it away about three months before I realised that it was Dark Side Of The Moon era Pink Floyd. Shame really, I’d have loved to have had that poster.
Anyway, when I left school and went to teach in China before I began my time at university, I had cooled off on listening to this album quite so often a lot (maybe even listening to it only once every two weeks), for the last lesson I gave, it didn’t really feel right to give a standard lesson. I wanted to share something which I felt was special to me with the class, and I wanted to give them a taste of just what was regarded as one of the most important musical works in the west. So, I got my laptop, one of them found speakers, and I just played them this album. It was a really special moment (although there was a pause and a rushing around to find batteries when the speaker ran out of battery in the middle of Brain Damage). I like to think that more than three of us in that room of fifty one thought it was good.
Topic: A Rather Sketchy Top 50 (Read 13060 times)
