The Listening Post over at WIRED does it's best music geek cum urban myth take on "Echoes", the full second side of the grossly under appreciated Meddle.
The passing of Pink Floyd's Richard Wright still remains a painful subject at Listening Post. But coupled with the earlier and still saddening loss of sci-fi titan Arthur C. Clarke, it is nearly unbearable. And eerie, considering that Pink Floyd's mind-blowing "Echoes," written by all of the band members long before petty divisions tore them apart, was a perfect soundtrack to Clarke and Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Pink Floyd's seminal Meddle was the first release in what was to be the band's storied run at the record books, and "Echoes" commanded the entire second half of the album. It is an epic without peer in rock, which hordes of resourceful fans would eventually mash in near-perfect synchronization (whatever that means) with 2001's storied finale "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite."
The phenomenon boasts its own fan site and Wikipedia mention. And while the band never came out and declared "Echoes" an intentional soundtrack to Clarke and Kubrick's film, Nicholas Schaffner's biography Saucerful of Secrets: A Pink Floyd Odyssey did little to beat down the rumors of a direct connection.
"Roger Waters, yet to balk at the sci-fi association, went so far as to say his 'greatest regret' was that they didn't do the score for 2001: A Space Odyssey," the book explains, "parts of which, particularly in the long, mind-blowing hallucinatory sequence near the end, nonetheless sound remarkably Floydian."
The synchronization, for your viewing pleasure.
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