Ummagumma

Ummagumma (1969) is a double album: one disc of live recordings, one disc of each member of Pink Floyd given a quarter-side to compose alone. The studio half is the interesting one. Roger Waters, Richard Wright, Nick Mason, and David Gilmour each took their portion and went somewhere — generally toward noise, loop, and texture rather than song. Wright’s contribution approaches free jazz; Mason’s piece is built almost entirely from percussion and found objects; Gilmour’s leans toward acoustic guitar improvisation taken to its furthest extent.

What the studio half documents is what happened when Floyd applied the permission that Sgt. Pepper’s had granted — to use the studio as a compositional instrument — without any commercial obligation to arrive anywhere comfortable. The Stockhausen and musique concrète influences are audible throughout; the record belongs in the same cultural moment as the early Krautrock and Berlin School experiments that were reaching the same conclusions from Germany.