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Pink Floyd: “Sysyphus” (excerpt)

From the album Ummagumma (1969)

The late 1960s witnessed the glorious psychedelic marriage of the traditions of rock-and-roll and experimental/electronic music.  The years 1968-69 alone saw The Beatles’ musique concrète-inspired “Revolution 9,” Pierre Henry’s collaboration with the British prog-rock band Spooky Tooth on the album Ceremony, and the release of Pink Floyd’s monumental double album Ummagumma, the band’s fourth album and arguably the most adventurous project they would ever undertake. 

The first half of Ummagumma consists of a set of live recordings of songs from the band’s earlier releases, while the second half is a collection of studio work by each of the band members individually.  Roger Waters contributed the pastoral ballad “Grantchester Meadows” and a bizarre piece of self-described “concrete poetry” entitled “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict.”  David Gilmour’s piece is called “The Narrow Way,” and Nick Mason rounds out the album with his “Grand Vizier’s Garden Party,” the body of which is a studio-created exploration of percussive sonority that evokes Edgard Varèse’s Ionisation.

Keyboardist Richard Wright’s contribution, entitled “Sysyphus,” opens with a minatory theme for orchestral strings à la Mellotron, punctuated by timpani strokes and cymbals.  From here we move seamlessly into a different expressive zone, where Wright demonstrates his classical chops with an ornate, Chopinesque piano interlude that gradually decomposes into a dissonant haze of sustained clusters. The next section, presenting yet another striking contrast of musical style, is a wonderfully disjunct mix of directly plucked piano sounds, percussive interjections, and tape-stretched vocal timbres.  After a bit of a lull toward the end (omitted in this excerpt), a cacophonous orchestral explosion ushers in a noisy sound-field from which the original “Sysyphus” theme slowly rises like a spectral figure from the fog. This is a “symphonic” conception of experimental rock that would be developed further in Pink Floyd’s later albums, starting with their very next release, Atom Heart Mother, whose title track is a 24-minute instrumental work of unsurpassed brilliance.

June 01, 2010, 10:16am

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Mr. Bungle: “Chemical Marriage”

From the album Disco Volante (1995)

Formed in Northern California in the mid-1980s, Mr. Bungle was one of premiere experimental rock outfits of the late 20th century.  The groups’s three studio albums— Mr. Bungle (1991), Disco Volante (1995), and California (1999)— stand as a monumental fin de millennium statement on the death and possible afterlife of rock music.

Their debut album is the most stylistically coherent of the three, perhaps describable as a sort of carnivalesque funk-metal.  The band’s swan song, California, has much of their trademark schizoid charm, but with a dominant exotica vibe and an unexpected tunefulness to many of the songs.

Disco Volante is to my mind the band’s magnum opus.  It is an album without a center, a crucible in which the detritus of a half-century of popular recorded music is amalgamated and transfigured into a fractured masterpiece of ear-melting beauty.

From the epic, multi-part “Carry Stress in the Jaw” (on a text by Edgar Allan Poe), to the (previously featured) pseudo-Arabic electronica of “Desert Search for Techno Allah,” to the cheesy surf-rock turned thrash metal of “Merry Go Bye-Bye,” Disco Volante is a bottomless vessel of auditory delight.  ”Chemical Marriage,” whose title invokes the alchemical fusion of male and female elements (coincidentia oppositorum), is an organ-driven number featuring the virtuosic wordless vocalizations of singer Mike Patton.

April 26, 2010, 4:40pm