Pink Floyd
The Piper At The Gates of Dawn

Finally, someone is getting closer to the truth (Bardamu)... I thought I was the only one along with a few others (Daevid Allen in particular with the entire trilogy and more of Radio Gnome Invisible dedicated to Barrett, definitely read the lyrics, with impressive references to Barrett).

I completely agree with the adjective "titanic" attributed to Nick Mason (he's really great, and so are the others, it's just that he was a real piece of work full of money and stingy since he lent some clothes to the others only for photo sessions, not to mention he freeloaded like crazy, and on top of that, he was a pompous cynic, and not just him).
However, let's all remember, as I possess some videos of certain sessions at Abbey Road related to The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn (very short and rare, to which certain studio photos refer in b\n), that Barrett also composed the bass, keyboard, and percussion scores, this is because, despite the fact that all the Floyds lived with Mike Leonard, the one who "directed" them a lot (the fifth Floyd, to whom many ideas are owed, even Barrett, since Leonard was a creator of advertising jingles for the BBC, which seem very childish judging by the advertising films of the time), and that they were "inclined" to new things, only Barrett was so brilliant and genius to "imagine" on a mental-emotional level the "direction" of the music as always preached by Leonard when he had them play the film "soundtracks" (The Piper corresponds, in duration, events, and even phrases, to "The War of The Worlds - of '53 I think the year - and if you notice every Floyd album maintains this "cinematic" characteristic or if you remember Barrett when he talked about one of his pieces: the piece is nocturnal, with Christmas movements, etc., which when they heard him speak like that they immediately said he was crazy? There!).

Well then, as the Floyds themselves later admitted, after Barrett, they "composed by geometricizing" the direction of the piece, not "imagining it" anymore as the "Diamond" did. In short, this album is not an "album", but a "contingency" of various events, which if you go very deep contain dates, events, and precise situations, which I would even define as magical. Daevid Allen, a long-time Barrett fan, tried, with personal success... indeed admirable, to even "imitate" the magical "dates" and "events" ("The Time is... In The Winter Solstice etc. etc." for Barrett, while for Allen it was on full moon nights like in Camembert Electrique and sang about Mama Mathilda driving his "interlocutor" crazy... read... read the translations... at half a euro a kilo by now...).
The discussion is much longer than expected also because it seems that the Floydian sounds of 'The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn' were influenced by Kandinskian theories on color applied in reverse using LSD as a medium, Time as gesture, Sound as Stroke, and the Mind of the Listener as Canvas. OOOHHHH... Barrett was a painter at art school!!! He knew these things well and was never a fool. Jenny confirms it... Jenny Spires. That Jenny Spires who, every time she got with a musician, turned him into a genius (Check And Confirm: Confirmed Response) Indeed! The canvas was the mind of the listener, and the colors are the sounds, and the practical technical effect, as a "new" technique, was, in the extreme case of "Interstellar Overdrive", the fact that at least one instrument kept the time, ensuring that for different "Canvases", understood as sensations, "global feeling", Minds, night after night in performances, moment by moment, the global direction of the Jam corresponded. Which "had to be" always different. And that real Jazz musicians loved it!

This greatly testifies, beyond the presumed, or wanted or effective "strangeness" of Barrett, of how it is indeed impossible to "think" or consider the utopian hypothesis of his fantastic "continuity" in the band (and in our utopian dream of hope) even if we played with probabilities: what would he have done if he had stayed? Etc. Etc. As hypothesized, the Jam "was" always different because the "contingencies" (the "strangeness" of those attending) were always different, the expectations were many and LSD helped. Damn, did it help.
Just as every moment is never the same as the other, every "Canvas" returned promptly "Virgin" the next day, in search of new fun, new wonder. And Barrett was the "Bard" of that "wonder" (...the infant air... of Mathilda Mother) and of the passing instant. The true "Piper". So it's not at all his fault the "improvisation" at the limit of decency (as the cheap bourgeois Floyds would accuse him) sometimes, live (he even cooked eggs at the UFO while playing, but not everyone knows that on stage he wasn't indispensable because he had "tuned" the binson echorec so that he had the time even for a quickie with his lady).

Live, they all improvised, even the people surrounding him. Moreover, the "contingent" nature of the album is the faithful mirror of the "contingent" custom (people of different strata, different races, different religions, different ideas, rich and poor, murderers and priests, the Beatles themselves, all in short seemed to "live under the same roof", and they did indeed) that in that short period took actual stable form after the perpetual evocations of Beatles and others right at the UFO. That's why the album is unstable. It's impossible to "hear" the sound of that year, the 1967, on this album. It's not true that you "hear" it. It's true that you "sense" it, like in the divine preceding "singles". Even Pete Townshend said it (and it's true) the album doesn't reflect the live concerts at UFO, because it will never have those "moments" lived there inside. Its "obliquity" which we trace back to Barrett's "obliquity" is not due to the presumed mental illness (Asperger or LSD or Mandrax or otherwise) of our champion, but to the actual impossibility of reproducing the "perfect instant" and its translation into "sound" to be recorded in a cold studio isolated from the "Canvases" (the minds to be colored), from the "people", from everything.

It is impossible to create a painting without any tool. And in fact, "The Piper At The Gates of Dawn", the "album", is rather a "playlist" of pieces, a kind of "manifesto" (note, the multiple irony every time we get closer to this album) that tells us: "look... we will be doing more or less this tonight, sure you'll hear it better tonight, but, after all, we'll all be there, and we'll have fun, are you coming too?". Indeed, Pete Townshend confirms that the "album" 'The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn' is a Walt Disney comic, chewing gum songs, compared to the Floyd's live show, and it's not at all "that" which he "heard" at UFO. That was something else.
It was an event never repeatable. A wonder never heard again and never heard before. They were the "Group" beloved by musicians. The most envied. The most mysterious. The most absurd. The "Group" in which the sound of the drum was made by the bass (interstellar overdrive in the film recording them at Chelsea Studio), the guitar by the keyboard (guitar and keyboard confused live and in the recording room guitars overlapped but the same principle in the node areas), the drum by the guitar (tick-tock for example), the bass by the drum (double bass drum, congas, percussion melody).

Even the musicians didn't know what sounds were and from which instrument they were played. They saw things in those years that only now on PCs with 5.1 we'd dream of: being surrounded by sound with the Azimuth-Coordinator and the circular speakers... MHA... and what were they... real UFOs... Yet they played Rhythm and Blues... Jazz at the limit... strange music... fairy tales for children told by the snake that seduced Eve in Paradise... Sweetness in poison... Only one group and one man could hold their own. Actually, two men. The group was the Beatles, the men were Frank Zappa and the "wonder of nature" Jimi Hendrix. But those weren't "human beings".
So, unique man (Barrett), unique gem (The P.A.T.G.O.D., the initials of the album, which if you notice in English translates to "The Tap God", that... tapping, ideally referring to tapping one's head and plectrum... to the very "tapping" nature of sounds throughout the album, almost the tapping from the end of Interstellar to The Gnome, where it seems that the "Gnome" is tapping us on the head on the side (the left), always surprising me though I've heard it thousands of times. All the music changed from that point on. All of it.

The Floyd improved it following its creator until the 71 album, until the album with Echoes (i.e. Meddle). As soon as they tried something else they realized they were short on ideas. They lost two years and must have cursed themselves a lot because Barrett was not there, that he couldn't be used. Thus Waters (it came to mind brilliantly, and by the way, he's an exceptional musician and I really mean it) decided to talk about Barrett with "Dark Side Of The Moon". Nice move, even very educated and spot-on, which opened the foundations of "existential music" for groups on intimate themes. If it had been only that album. But they continued with "Wish You Were Here" upping the ante. But they are all moves aimed at "continuing" the instant of "light", creating albums that dazzle us because they are placed as mirrors that help us better understand the unwatchable light of "The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn" (provided we consider Barrett as a person-character, the distant period, the mechanism of memory and absence... of "perfect moments" ... and much more). Well okay then.
They tried again with "Animals" (beautiful without a doubt and especially very different, with a clear tendency to "move away" from the Barrett problem), but... nothing to be done. Barrett is still unexhausted (and will be for a very long time because no one has yet grasped the epoch-making scope for the new Theory of Perception implicitly produced by these, of the totally innovative evoked Perception, which has already earned me a thirty with honors at university and a research proposal to delve into by a teacher to incorporate it as a "new Gestalt hypothesis about global perceptions... etc. etc. etc. bullshit you might not be very interested in anyway), Waters still unexhausted exorcizes him further placing him as the only depositary of the truth about the existence of something Barrett created first (but also Roy Eriksonn, Spence, and others), which is "The Wall".

The Wall between the self and the world that is made by ourselves due to poorly placed memory, which prevents us from living "the instant". Let's all remember that Barrett is "astonishing". Because he is a genius like few. If he were only the "Bard" of the instant he wouldn't consider at all what happens next. Instead, his foresight is beginning to appear in all its raw and quiet sweetness. The calm. The Early Pink Floyd paid for the theft of the name (invented by Barrett) with the disbanding of the initial group. Gilmour, knowing he helped Barrett with his solo albums, still takes advantage of it. He already knows that Barrett's new solo paths are still too steep for everyone, too vast to traverse (in fact, surprises come out that seem to be made now. Isn't it very strange that new pieces of Barrett come out at very long intervals and still today?). He didn't consider a fact that very few know, which I also discovered with difficulty: the exegesis of Barrett's lyrics and music from the first song to the last corresponds to a very precise path, which has a well-defined "Conclusion". Maybe Syd smiles from that point, knowing that sooner or later someone will get there. He smiles because in his immense desire for freedom he is aware of having "monopolized" the universe of undefined perception, as an entity opposed to the creative limit in the innovator-musician-audience synergy, only for a "closed", "finished" period. This seems to be observed more closely in both lyrics and music.

Whoever surpasses that moment, perhaps won't even notice it. But Syd will smile. Wherever he is.