Pink Floyd
Delicate Sound Of Thunder

(The eternal ephemeral charm of air sculptures... )

In the evocative sequence of "Nirvana" by G. Salvatores, by opening the closet and moving aside the clothes seen every day, the female protagonist realizes that it is not a closet, but a window to a parallel world, a virtual reality with a purplish alien profile of which the one we live in is just one of the endless terminals. Retracing "A Rebours" over the last 40 years of Historia de La Musica Rock, we find an English triad (and as we will see, a similar concept): the Beatles, explorers of all the infinite creative opportunities situated from one end to the other of the instrumental range of the time, the Rolling Stones, in fact holders of the secret (so it seems) of that slang destined to remain untranslatable which is "Rock", understood in its inspired yet monolithic sense, and a third group, far more mysterious and elusive, hallucinatory and yet incredibly current even today, despite its far more painful and troubled history (compared to the other two groups). The monumental work "Sgt Peppers and The Lonely Hearts Club Band" opened an intuitive breach, an opening among the rocks that allowed a glimpse of the Future's skyline: that perspective was equivalent to the Nirvana Window. The same purplish, luminescent, submerged virtual reality as a world reached by branching off along a different direction of the infinite possible realities radiance inhabited the grooves of the vinyls of that mysterious group: Pink Floyd. The application of Rock, a linguistic matrix forged in North American lands, to the Song heritage of more "European" folk, until enveloping it, would create an expressive language that still today remains credible and current. These were Liverpool's Beatles.

Londons' Pink Floyd cubistically-analytically deconstructed that expressive idiom, to synthetically reassemble it in unheard, deformed forms, like the act of observing oneself in a concave mirror, or a wide-angle photograph of an unrecognizable scene: the same world but another world. The first, skewed, brilliant, intuitive, splendid, and poetic (since the title) "The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn" (The Drinker at the Gates of Dawn), was followed by the majestically pioneering "A Saucerful Of Secrets," (one of the first clear examples of rock-electronic fusion), unfortunately, the story was painful first and troubled later. Painful because the creative mind and musical genius of the group, Syd Barrett, practically had to leave the band from the first album due to the devastating lesions produced by LSD, his place in the foreground was taken from the third album "More" by guitarist David Gilmour. The other soul of Pink Floyd is embodied by Roger Waters, about whom it would be said (after albums like "The Wall," "The Final Cut," and his subsequent solo career) that he was a talent born in the wrong century: more devoted to opera than to song, more to grand theatrical structures than to early post-Beatlesian rock experiments, perhaps the most precious intuition was the idea of "Space Rock": a kind of sound that created in the listener, thanks to the great work on sound effects, a sensation of expansion, enlargement, and multidimensionality of the environmental space in which those songs were staged. After splendid works like "Ummagumma," perhaps the most "spatial" of Pink Floyd's albums, "Atom Heart Mother," decidedly conceptual, and the creative peak reached with "The Dark Side Of The Moon" (although along with "Meddle" it was not very liked by the early fans) as well as "Wish You Were Here" and the aforementioned dark, violent and claustrophobic concept "The Wall," drew the varied (and twisted) artistic parabola in fact produced by the Waters-Gilmour work. After which, as mentioned, came the troubled events: the legal disputes, Roger Waters' departure, David Gilmour's retaining the band's name, and the blackout, which lasted almost 10 years, until the return of light, dreamy (but not too much) of "A Momentary Lapse Of Reason."

With the renaissance album dated 1987, we arrive at this double live "Delicate Sound Of Thunder." Programmatic title: the sound combined with the most refined and imposing light-show in the history of Rock, is what dominates everything, the stage is a gigantic machine where Pink Floyd are so small as to be almost unnoticeable.

And the sound, made of refined, silk-like textures, worked, chiseled, and clear, a kind of chamber space, so classic as to give the idea of making one lose track of who was its inventor. A sort of "scene that celebrates itself" centered on a single stage, a concept, forged and developed by Pink Floyd, that of psychedelia, aimed since the mid-period records, "Meddle," "Animals" at recovering the neoclassical aesthetic, the sculptural beauty of bodies, the beauty of sound in the most original theaters (the archaeological excavations of Pompeii in 1972, the St. Mark's Basin in Venice in 1989), where the new wave would have further explored the territories of decadent romance and the sublime.

The first of the two vinyls is almost entirely focused on compositions taken from the most recent "A Momentary Lapse Of Reason": "Sorrow," "The Dogs Of War", and the most evocative and successful track "On The Turning Away", with the overture entrusted to the famous guitar solo of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond", initially dotted with soft and mysterious sounds settling on the delicate carpet of Nick Mason's keyboards, caressed by the sax's sonority, then Gilmour's electric guitar (and the subsequent explosion of a rightfully ecstatic audience). There isn't much more to add about the music, "Momentary..." isn't a memorable record, a goal that doesn't seem to interest David Gilmour much (nor personally me), if the so-called "commercial" music was all like this, there wouldn't be a need for such (useless) distinctions (after all it doesn't appear that Peter Gabriel or David Sylvian compose songs just for the sake of it)...

The second chapter is instead a dive into the relatively "recent" past: the opening with the unsettling "One Of These Days" (1971, opening track of "Meddle") marked by the obsessive bass (one wonders if some Punk artist remembered it while mocking the "dinosaurs"), throughout the track's duration, then it's the turn of a more melodic track "Time", (from "The Dark Side Of The Moon"), then the funk of "Money" (from "Wish You Were Here") and (obviously) "Another Brick In The Wall - Pt 2" (the group's most famous single), martial rhythm but anti-militaristic-alienating obsession, a contradiction upon which the entire "The Wall" seems to be built. A relaxing break comes with the most famous ballad of all time (Pink Floyd-speaking) "Wish You Were Here", then it's the turn of two more episodes from "The Wall" which close the live show: "Comfortably Numb", blue, enveloped in a boundless sadness, and the (apparently?) liberating "Run Like Hell". Apparently, because it seems that the melodies and rock arrangements suit closing the live, almost like a sort of "grand finale": debatable, as it represented in the original work one of the peaks of obsession and madness, thus appearing in such a "play" entirely out of context.

Much has been said (mostly negatively) about the Gilmour-era, until reaching the rightful conclusion that "Pink Floyd either you love them (and thus enjoy listening) or you hate them (and in that case just stop the player)". It would be quite ungrateful, for this writer, towards Gilmour and Mason, to endlessly repeat "the real Pink Floyd are those of, or at most of..." quite useless as well, since Pink Floyd are here and now. One can criticize what one does not like and even what one likes: I simply listen, following with my inner gaze, how much beauty is in these melodies, how seductive, evocative they can be, how these splendid air sculptures are still laden, today with a charm that no longer has time. How much poetic delicacy and strength can be in the sound of a leaf falling, of a drop of water in a half-filled glass, of a thunder preceded by the blinding blue light of the lightning.