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Ummagumma presents itself with a double act: (in a green box set + cover poster)
Ummagumma studio album and Ummagumma live album, with four very important pieces, concerning the brief but intense musical/psychedelic career of Syd Barrett in Pink Floyd.
The live album indeed contains: Astronomy Domine, Careful With Axe, Eugene, Set The Control For The Heart Of The Sun and A Saucerful Of Secrets, (all tracks are taken from the first two albums: The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn and A Saucerful Of Secrets)
With Ummagumma, Pink Floyd cleared their minds, emptied every visual and auditory perception, purifying, so to speak, the music to such an extent as to make it raw, abstract, almost incomprehensible!
But what is Ummagumma?
Ummagumma is chaos! Disorder, genius and unruliness, it's a drunken, clear sound that dances light and confused towards a light, towards infinity, towards itself, towards freedom!
Ummagumma is divided into four parts written by each of them!
the initial and dark Sysyphus part 1, by Wright, which in the second part improvises into a grand classical piece for piano, until it sinks into a deep abstract, unknown, and unknown world. The delicate Grantchester Meadows, and the unsettling Several Species by Waters,
the beautiful The Narrow Way by Gilmour and the percussion and beyond experiments by Mason.
I conclude with two warnings: 1) Not suitable for those who believe that music is just a simple melody to hum!
2) For those who use drugs solely for pure fun!
Tracklist Lyrics and Samples
01 Astronomy Domine (08:29)
Lime and limpid green, a second scene
A fight between the blue you once knew.
Floating down, the sound resounds
Around the icy waters underground.
Jupiter and Saturn, Oberon, Miranda
And Titania, Neptune, Titan.
Stars can frighten.
Blinding signs flap,
Flicker, flicker, flicker blam. Pow, pow.
Stairway scare Dan Dare who's there?
Lime and limpid green
The sounds surrounds the icy waters underground
Lime and limpid green
The sounds surrounds the icy waters underground.
03 Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun (09:12)
Little by little the night turns around
Counting the leaves which tremble at dawn
Lotuses lean on each other in yearning
Under the eaves a swallow is resting
Set the controls for the heart of the sun
Over the mountain watching the watcher
Breaking the darkness waking the grapevine
One inch of love is one inch of shadow
Love is the chateau that ripens the wine
Set the controls for the heart of the sun
The heart of the sun...
Witness the man who raves at the wall
Making the shape of his question to heaven
Whether the sun will fall in the evening
Will he remember the lesson of giving?
Set the controls for the heart of the sun
The heart of the sun...
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Other reviews
By Torre Ste1
This is the first post-Barrett work, in which the band members do not deny the psychedelia of their predecessor, but do not refuse to experiment with new sounds.
David Gilmour manages to give the group a new sound that will characterize them for the rest of their career and make them a key band in the history of music.
By Bubi
"Ummagumma is chaos! Disorder, genius, and unruliness, it’s a drunken, clear sound that dances lightly and confusedly toward a light, toward infinity, toward itself, toward freedom!"
I am a great admirer of Pink Floyd, whom I consider the most important in Rock history, and I love almost all their works.
By floydsound95
"Ummagumma is an album worth listening to, even though it is not easy to do so."
"The album’s gem... foreshadows the subsequent Pink Floyd sound."
By 33giri
This vinyl support is miraculous and indescribable, as the artistic completeness is at its highest level.
There is the vital breath, the dedication, and the zeal of the imaginative, chimerical master from Cambridge: Roger Keith Barrett.
By score_angel
You don’t know whether to choose the first or the second as better.
Once you’ve well understood and digested all that experimental phase, you don’t just put it on a shelf thinking you’ll dust it off sometime later.
