Now, Rick Wright the keyboard player has just played a keyboard-based piece. The opening statement returns near the end to round off this laughably brilliant cod-classical "if Spinal Tap were prog" suite. Part Four is the longest and most texturally varied, displaying Wright beginning to stealthily stake out his corner as the cornerstone of the classic Floydian aural blend. III, with wild synth lines shrieking over the piano and percussion melange. This is displayed ever more clearly in the cranky, discordant Sisyphus Pt. It can already be seen that Ummagumma's studio half is about each member of the Floyd reaching far beyond their grasp for sheer grandiosity and generally grasping it only in gorgeously silly self-indulgence. Wright then calms things down for part two, with a nice piano piece that wouldn't be too out of place on The Faust Tapes. An ominous, booming (I'm guessing) mellotron melody and thumping timpanis announce Ummagumma's seamless blend of the breathtakingly sumblime and the completely over-the-top ridiculous. The curtain is grandly raised on Ummagumma's studio album with Rick Wright's four-part keyboard extravaganza Sisyphus. But it probably works better the original way, as, in my humble opinion, Ummagumma is a monster masterpiece of one half bizarre, crazed and often quite beautiful studio experiments and one half blindingly kosmiche re-workings of tracks from the band's career thus far. So it was strange for me to hear the album as it was originally intended.where's the live Astronomy Dominie gone after Sisyphus? etc. In order to even out the playing time on each side, the cassette is sequenced studio track, live track, studio track, live track and so on. On the original vinyl and the CD reissue, the first 47-minute disc gives each band member half an album side to indulge their own interests, and the second 40-minute disc offers four live tracks.
In the days before I owned a CD player, I used to own Ummagumma on cassette. If Q magazine ever ask me to contribute to their "You Might Think I'm Mad, But." mini-article, this is unquestionably going to be the bizarre object of affection that I'll expound on. I couldn't resist re-acquainting myself with an old favourite. But it's only yesterday I noticed that Napier University Music Library carries not one, but two copies of the most sprawlingly indulgent, and, for me, most unfairly maligned Pink Floyd album of all: Ummagumma.Ĭhrist on a bike, what kind of music department do we have? Sergeant Bloody Pepper is of course present, eternally the musical meritocracy's equivalent of what Jordan is to the Daily Star, alongside better inclusions such as Forever Changes. This has introduced me to some nice chunks of Stockhausen, Berg, Xekanis, Messian et al, but there's also a few pop & rock CDs in amongst all the orchestral works, presumably for some popular music module. It's mostly classical stuff for the music students to work off, but anyone can borrow CDs.
The other day, I was browsing through the CD section of my university's library.