Category Archives: Art

The Moon Landing Inspired Pink Floyd’s Most Overlooked Song

50 years ago today Pink Floyd commemorated the moon landing with an improvised, seven and a half minute performance of a song titled, “Moonhead”, a spacey, atmospheric piece commissioned by the BBC that featured “cosmic guitar effects, pulses of percussion, and Waters’s ominously descending bass line,” “an eerie piece of improvisation that translates the breathtaking awe of the moon landing into music.”

The song was mostly lost to obscurity until being released in 2016 as part of the box set titled, “The Early Years 1965–1972” but as The Atlantic article says, “For seven and a half minutes on the night of July 20, 1969, Pink Floyd took thousands of BBC viewers to the moon. Of course, two men were already there: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the Apollo 11 astronauts who became the first human beings to set foot on the lunar surface. However, the members of Pink Floyd—David Gilmour, Roger Waters, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright—weren’t using science, calculus, and technology to transport people through space on that fateful evening. They were using music.”

Read the entire article here.

New Bruce Hornsby: “Absolute Zero”.

From the NY Times review: “One way for a songwriter to invigorate a long career is to keep breaking routines, to change up methods and parameters and solve different puzzles with every album. It’s a modus operandi that has carried Bruce Hornsby from radio hits in the 1980s through bluegrass, jazz, a stint in the Grateful Dead and, lately, collaborations with a younger-generation fan, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver. “Absolute Zero,” his 21st album, is one more daring, rewarding turn in his catalog: 10 knotty, thoughtful yet rambunctious songs that juggle scientific concepts, history and human relationships.” Read the whole review here.

Paul Simon to Release New Album Soon

Still incredibly creative at 74, Paul is scheduled to release Stranger to Stranger on June 3 (with a cover image apparently by artist Chuck Close). If you missed his last album, So Beautiful or So What, check it out. It is one of his best.

The NY Times has a good piece about the album here.

Radiohead Releases ‘A Moon Shaped Pool’

“Radiohead give us one of their most musically and emotionally arresting albums, full of low-flying panic attacks and gorgeous orchestration.” Read the entire Rolling Stone review here.

Pink Floyd’s Endless River Released in U.S.

The videos that are part of the Bonus Edition are not much to speak of, just home video from the recording sessions, but the album sounds pretty damn good! You can read a review by The Guardian here.