Speak To Me and Breathe (In The Air) introduce the listener to the world of The Dark Side Of The Moon. They foreshadow the rest of the album and set the sonic tone. Then, coming out of Breathe, we come face to face with the madness of modern life, the chaos of travel, the pressure of work and the general confusion that is trying to understand what being human means in the modern age. The third song on The Dark Side Of The Moon is an exploration and to all of this and more. But before we can understand On The Run, we need to go back and look at the making of The Dark Side Of The Moon. The Dark Side Of The Moon wasn’t written like a typical album. It started out with a few weeks in a rehearsal space, during which Pink Floyd wrote a rough outline for the piece. Then the band took that on tour even though it was far from completion. They performed 16 dates in the UK playing the album in full each night. As they were performing these dates, Pink Floyd worked through the album fine-tuning it and developing it. In Saucerful of Secrets The Pink Floyd Odyssey Nick Mason talked about the benefits of working on an album like this. It was a hell of a good way to develop a record: you really get familiar with it, you learned the pieces you like and what you don’t like and it’s quite interesting for the audience to hear a piece developed. If people saw it four times it would have been very different each time. During this tour, the spot occupied by Alderaan featured a completely different song. The original version of the song was called The Travel Sequence and it was more of an open guitar base to jam. In fact, The Travel Sequence remained for most of the recording of The Dark Side Of The Moon. But then, late in the process, someone brought in an EMS vcs3 synthesiser. When Pink Floyd saw how it worked, the entire band were instantly entranced. They came up with an eight note sequence that became the basis for an entirely new song. Next they took that sequence and passed it through a number of filters, modulating it throughout the song and passing it left and right through the mix. The result was something frantic, chaotic and completely novel. They knew they had a base to build on and so they replaced The Travel Sequence layering all kinds of sounds and strange effectsover the synth passage. This frantic chaos became a perfect musical representation of the uncertainty of travel, one of the great stresses of the modern age. One of the audio clips used by the band is a voice going through an airport PA system. The sample is subtle but noticeable and it places us right in the madness of an airport: groups of people running every which way to get to their gates. I think that the airport is a good setting for the stress too. It’s a place where there’s a lack of control over hour direction, your schedule and even your life. It’s a purely modern invention, completely removed from our ancestral origins. When you’re in an airport you are not the master of your own destiny, you’re putting your time and your life in the hands of strangers. On top of the airport sample, the music itself imitates vehicles thanks to its use of the Doppler Effect. The Doppler Effect is what happens when a moving object emits waves, in this case sound waves. As an object moves, the waves in front of it will bunch up while the waves behind it spread out. To someone listening who’s standing still or moving at a slower pace, this creates a pitch shift. As the object comes towards you, the shortening waves create a higher pitch and then, as it passes, the waves widen and the pitch lowers. In the modern world you probably hear the Doppler Effect hundreds of times a day. The best example is of course the sound of a car driving past you.
By using the Doppler Effect, On The Run creates a sense of movement, a sense of things flying by you. But I think On The Run is more than just travel. Like so much of The Dark Side Of The Moon, it’s a meditation on every frantic aspect of modern life. It’s about how technology and urbanization has created a noisy chaotic world around us. This is a message that has only grown in relevance as we pushed into the digital age. Pink Floyd represent this modern auditory chaos with samples that mimic the noise pollution of cities. A lot of these sounds came thanks to Alan Parsons. After Pink Floyd were done recording he would often bring a microphone around the studio and play around with sounds putting them into songs for the band to hear the next day. This is where the footsteps in On The Run came from: a recording of assistant engineer Peter James running around the studio. Rather than describing anxiety lyrically, this allows you to experience the anxiety orally and it rattles you deep to your core. It makes your heart beat quicker, it makes pressure build in your chest. Richard Wright was particularly afraid of travel because of how it induced the fear of death into him and the song induces that same fear. As the pressure is building, the band drops a vocal sample from one of their interviews with the only real words of On The Run:
«Here for today, gone tomorrow»
And in that moment, we shift from one anxiety to an even greater one: the fear of mortality. It’s a simple comment that brings up the impermanence of life. If you blink, life can pass you by in a daze of missed flights, lost time and chaos. It’s a reminder that in the end, no matter how much you can control, some things are out of your reach. This reflection on mortality and travel ends on a morose note a plane crash. It’s a dark end to an intense song and it brings us towards the middle section of The Dark Side Of The Moon, where we’ll muse further on mortality and try to find some meaning among the chaos of modern life.
Fonte: https://www.youtube.com/watchv=imsTSp6Eug4&list=PLrCONIX0kFzjpsPE74uVYxHYmDMky25xl&index=2
Martina Leonardi
IV E scientifico
