Obscured By Clouds

Obscured by Clouds (1972) is the La Vallée film soundtrack — Barbet Schroeder’s film about a group of Westerners searching for a mythological valley in Papua New Guinea. Floyd had done the More soundtrack for Schroeder three years earlier; this is the more developed collaboration, the music more textural and atmospheric, less like a rock album and more like music meant to live underneath images.

The specific quality of Obscured by Clouds — built for a purpose it can now outlive — is what connects it to the imagined-soundtrack tradition running through the IDIB records and the Symmetry material. Film music separated from its film becomes something else: atmospheric without explanation, narrative without story. This record arrived at that condition by commission; later records arrived at it deliberately.