Echoes
| Echoes | |
|---|---|
| Pink Floyd | |
| publication | October 30, 1971 |
| length | 23:31 |
| Genre (s) | Art rock , rock music |
| Author (s) | Pink Floyd |
| text | Roger Waters , David Gilmour , Nick Mason , Richard Wright |
| music | Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Richard Wright |
| album | Meddle |
Echoes is a composition by the British rock group Pink Floyd that includes long instrumental parts , sound effects and improvisations .
description
Written by all four members of the group ( Roger Waters , Richard Wright , David Gilmour and Nick Mason ), Echoes is the finale of the Meddle album . The piece runs over a length of 23:31 and completely occupies the second side (B-Side) of the album's edition on vinyl record . In addition, it is included as track number 5 in a shortened version on the best-of album called Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd . It is the third longest composition of the group after Atom Heart Mother (23:35) and the composite Shine On You Crazy Diamond , which has a playing time of over 26 minutes. Compared to these two songs, Echoes is not split into different parts, but the composition has been put together from different fragments. It was used as the beginning and end of the film Live At Pompeii , and in the surfing film Crystal Voyager , the song accompanies the full-length film sequences of breaking waves in the evening sun.
The intro is remarkable, in which Richard Wright mimics the sound of an echo sounder by constantly repeating a single high tone (a three-stroke h) on his grand piano . The grand piano is played via a Leslie cabinet, an organ amplifier with a rotating loudspeaker. This gives the sound a strange tremolo . The sound therefore differs significantly from that of a grand piano played without amplification. The Beatles first used this sound effect on the "White Album" in the song Don't Pass Me By .
The sound experiments in the middle section of Echoes clearly refer to the previous albums A Saucerful of Secrets and Ummagumma . Roger Waters creates ghostly howling sounds on his electric bass with a bottleneck using even circular movements, while guitarist David Gilmour uses the reversed wah-wah pedal to create screeching sounds reminiscent of seagulls screams, which are known as the seagull effect . ) became known. Richard Wright can only be heard softly with his Hammond organ , which was either linked to a volume pedal or whose internal volume control was operated while playing.
The piece ends with a soaring Shepard Risset glissando . (see Shepard scale )
Early versions and alternate titles
The piece had its origins in 36 music experiments that were written independently of each other by each band member. These fragments were named Nothing, Parts 1–24 (even if they were 36 elements) as the working title. The other elaborations were titled accordingly The Son of Nothing and The Return of the Son of Nothing .
During this phase of development of the piece, the first verse of Echoes was being worked on. Originally, the text described the meeting of two celestial bodies (Text: "planets meeting face to face"), but 'increasing due Waters concerns that Pink Floyd by such title in the drawer of the space rock would be placed, you wrote the lyrics new and used Underwater pictures too.
The title Echoes has also been reworked several times: Waters, who was a huge football fan, suggested calling the piece We Won the Double to celebrate Arsenal FC's victory in 1971. During a tour in Germany in 1972, the piece was also called Looking Through the Knothole in Granny's Wooden Leg at two appearances (Böblingen, Frankfurt) .
Contributors
- Richard Wright: keyboards , sound effects, vocals
- David Gilmour: vocals , guitar , fretless electric bass , sound effects
- Roger Waters: electric bass , sound effects
- Nick Mason: drums , percussion , sound effects
Trivia
- If you mute the sound of the film in 2001: A Space Odyssey at the beginning of the last chapter "Rebirth" and instead let the piece Echoes run synchronously (so that the word "Jupiter" appears on the first "Echosounder ping") interesting analogies . For example, the music virtually adapts to the various psychedelic images.
- George Greenough's 1973 film Crystal Voyager ends with a 23-minute segment in which the entire piece is used as background music for the surf scenes.
Web links
Translation of the lyrics into German
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b pink-floyd.org: FAQ
- ↑ The Kubrick FAQ. visual-memory.co.uk