UMMAGUMMA

Much like In the Court of the Crimson King was a tremendous musical jolt that helped spawn the symphonic wave of progressive music, I think it is fair to state that Ummagumma inadvertently almost single-handedly created the Krautrock scene. Reading up on several of the gurus inside the wondrous and magical world that is Kraut, i saw a similar pattern emerging of general love of Pink Floyd and especially this album. Split into two discs you get a live album, that shows Floyd at their most aggressive primal side, and a second disc containing a studio recorded album of all the members coming up with whatever they felt like. The whole thing feels like a giant fuck you to the general music scene, and the combined mass media consensus of how music is suppose to sound like. Direction less and quite the opposite at times, that it in reality doesn´t even fit in anywhere if we´re going to slip stickers and signs on the mother. Here we´ve got a genuine artistic statement of pure innovation and letting your imagination run wild in a studio and see what comes up at the break of the day. You also get one of the best songs David Gilmour ever penned in "The Narrow Way pt3" which seems to end in something much like a waterfall-choir cascading washing guitar wails, that take you places only Gilmour can. Bereft of any cohesion and pattern we are also served with the creepy "Several species of small fury Animals gathering together and grooving with a Pict" (!!!!!!!??) - that keeps all of it´s lyrical promises sonically... Keeping with the anti-cohesion I thought I´d bring up one of the most bone-chilling, scary and iconic musical outbursts that Pink Floyd ever did. I am of course speaking of the incredible "Careful with that Axe, Eugene", that delivers a primal scream from Roger Waters mid-song which cuts through flesh and metal like Conan the Barbarian slicing up human fillets. The extraordinary thing about the way Roger uses his voice, is actually that he doesn´t exhale as he scream- like we normally do when we talk or sing, no- he is sucking up the words like a vacuum cleaner gone metaphysical, almost as if the sounds come from outside of himself. Pure horror and certainly one of the most violent episodes ever to be recorded in the history of music. -This is coming from a guy who grew up listening to Napalm Death and Obituary... I still stand by my words. This short moment truly transcends its media - momentarily watching through the keyhole. Whether this record tries to disguise itself in mystic wordless ramblings or is tinkling your spinal cord with gooey wild spacerock, you can never honestly say that it get´s boring. Then again I always pictured Floyd as the British musical counterpoint of the Monty Python philosophy, meaning that whatever you do - you´d better do it in spite of everything and with peepers wide open and restlessly tuned into the greatest human attribute: the imagination. -And imagination is loose and twisting and often eluding you, when you try to explain it or make use of it, making it genuinely hard to transcript it elsewhere than in art, -and nowhere better than within the musical realm, where true meaning of things we can´t fathom seems to exist buried deep in vast oceans of notes. Like the Egyptian carpet ride unfolding before your ears in "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun" with Nick Mason thundering away on the drums like a rare hypnotizing shaman of the west, or maybe the understated suppressed beauty of "Grantchester Meadows" will better put into perspective the manner in which this record was approached in - treating sounds and noises as tapestries of sometimes unparalleled funny music, but even more so an altogether new way of generating moods within the modern airwaves. This is probably why I think of this record as the father of the Krautrock movement, that exploded all through Germany in the 70´ies - bringing with it music that tried to free itself of every jagged imprisoning boundary out thunk by the laws of the universe. Safe to say we don´t need any laws to impose on our music, but it is rather seldom, we breach our mental levies and LISTEN to something that is truly free of any prefabricated recipes. Break on through to the other side! Right on Jim! Right on!