Pablo Espinosa
La Jornada newspaper
Saturday, May 3, 2025, p. A12
The cultural event of the moment occurred for three days in the movie theaters, with the premiere of the restored version for IMAX screens of the documentary Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, Filmed in 1972 by Adrian Maben.
The huge artistic dimensions of this film and musical treasure were revealed as never before thanks to the restoration works of the visual and sound tape. There is still more to discover, when vinyl is launched with the sound quality we could appreciate in the movie theater.
Before our eyes, the magnificence of the images of that peculiar concert without audience, a work of art of film story. In our ears, the hallucinated music that connoisseurs locate as the Non Plus Ultra of the music of Pink Floyd, since we met it in its beta -format videocaset version, today practically impossible to reproduce it because there are no longer the machines for that format, although later there were versions in Devedé. The original audio is also achieved, but what we witness last weekend we will never forget it for its artistic impact so thunderous, so fulminating.
The first thing we heard in the room is an incisive note, percussive at the same time as electronics, an infinitesimal drip, a cloud. We already knew her, of course, because it is the beginning of the piece Echoes, of the album Meddle, of 1971, but when listening to it in the film, to all technological power, we finally discover its nature:
It’s like a Stanley Kubrick film, and that leads us to the original source: it is Gyorgy Ligeti, who by 1971, when the Pink Floyd recorded Echoes, He had already defined the depth of his musical thinking: still music.
Put to sound, beautiful reader, friendly reader, the beginning of Echoes And you will agree on the assert. The mind travels to 2001: A space Odyssey, And then towards Eyes Wide Shut.
Put now to sound Distant, Gyorgy Ligeti composition, and then Atmospheres, and will experience the effect of still music that the Hungarian composer sought and achieved.
Lighti’s inquiry concentrated on the functioning of the human brain and its ability to perceive sounds that, if they are very fast, does not reach the understanding of each of its parts, but receives them as a whole, as a mass, like a cloud. So he dispensed with the use of the pulse in his music and dispersed melodic lines at pleasure among the performers of his works.
Lighti’s next step was to extend the duration of the notes progressively, to convert a compressed melody into a chord and thus make it audible, and then applied strategic rhythmic changes until their concept of Micropolifonia
.
But his goal was, in reality, to achieve static music, which we can appreciate in his work Atmospheres. A recognizable musicia in which listening fails to differentiate its subdivisions and that progresses progressively.
His conception of static music was intended to cause in the listener the feeling that time freezes, that music flows, without the beginning or end, forever. He also managed to evoke in listening to a feeling that there is a space in his music. According to intensity, there is a sense of proximity or remoteness.
And that and nothing is the beginning and development of the piece entitled Echoes, de Pink Floyd.
In case there was any doubt, what they sing to Duo Roger Waters and Richard Wright describes exactly that process. I will immediately put the initial verses according to my version, because in poetry there is no translation:
Up, the albatros hang
immobile in the air
And deep in the waves
corals like caves in labyrinths
The echo of a distant time sounds
Distant time, in addition, represented on the stage proposed by the filmmaker Adrian Maben to David Gilmour: the Pompeya Egregia, buried by the eruption of the Vesubio volcano in the year 79 and from which his coliseum – constructed, by the way, a century before the Roman – and where fights of gladiators and other shows were made For its builders: Spectacula
.
No one led us to the mainland
Nobody knows the dos and the why
But something bullet and looks out
and begins to climb to the light
Music reaches climax and verses too:
Strangers in the street
Two looks are found
And I am you and what I see is me
And take your hand
And I accompany you to the mainland
And nobody forces us to move
And nobody speaks and nobody looks
No one floats around the sun
Already the guitar of David Gilmour has opened cits in the orange sky on Pompeii White, possessed as shamans when they enter trance when directing a sacred ceremony.
Already the drums endorse us, and the looks are found, they already come together, the souls hug. Everything is already magic and still music. The minutes fly. When the film ends, our mind is flying every hour goes to it that initial sound of Echoes And all the sounds that caused us astonishment, fury, charm.
To the river of still sounds there are lava rivers, arid landscapes from which volcanic steam emanates, murals made with mosaics by artists of the ancient Pompeii rescued from the eruption that are exhibited in the National Museum of Archeology of Naples.
Ash and Lapilli mantles, those pyroclastic fragments that are born from the fragmentation of the lava that cover the bubbles that ascend and exploit by difference in internal pressure with that of the environment.
And all that in the high contrast of technology: Roger Waters activates a rudimentary synthesizer while David Gilmour sits on the floor to extract sounds that Karlheinz Stockhausen introduced in 1956 in his work Singing of the youngsters: Space locations from sound sources, with its mixture of concrete music and electronic music, while Richar Wright links colored sounds to the Olivier Messiaen and the shaman Nick Mason continues with the lost look, making the patches to which he hit, with red adhesive tape, rocks raised from the sandy floor that make these four jipis hallucinated.
Since the original material gave just an hour, the filmmaker Adrian Maben added scenes filmed in Paris and London, nothing less than in the maximum temple called Abby Road studies, where the Floyd prepared for those dates their new masterpiece: The Dark Side of the Moon, And they solely with fragments then unpublished.
To that stitching Maben added scenes of a lot of humor, but deep reflections when the four Floyds took a break in the Abby Road cafeteria and talked and between jokes and they would see net of high tonnage. For example, when Nick Mason said jokingly that Roger Waters wanted the four to do works of art instead of rock pieces, to which Don Rogelio Aguas countered with brilliance: if you give a Stratocaster to anyone, that anyone does not become Eric Clapton. The important thing about musical production is to know how and what each of the instruments is touched, be it a synthesizer or a guitar. The important thing, Waters finished, is to move.
And that is the nature of art. Your moving ability. As moving is the piece they added in Paris, entitled Mademoiselle Nobs, Because it is a blues that sings a beautiful dog from Raza Borzoi called Nobs.
And so the minutes flew in front of the film screen and surrounded by powerful speakers.
The premiere of the restored version for IMAX of the film screens Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii It is the cultural event of the moment. This moment when he dance in our mind the still music that put to sound Pink Floyd on top of what was magma and lava, rage and fury, sound and stillness.
All this congruence has erotic, poetic, human edges: Pompeya was the place of pleasure that was petrified under the volcano.
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