Ron Geesin & Roger Waters - Our Song

Progressive Rock, Experimental/Avant-Garde As opposed to some of their peers like Soft Machine for example, Pink Floyd wasn't comprised of fluid members who were frequently drifting back and forth from various projects like solo albums and outside collaborations. Pink Floyd was a very insular entity, especially during this 1969-1971 period where it's still somewhat of a mystery of exactly what the writing and recording dynamic was like. They seemed like a faceless band, just turning out exotic, atmospheric, and sonically advanced, self contained albums. It wasn't exactly clear where the ideas where coming from, and it still isn't. Occasionally they'd bring in a collaborator, but only the most obscure. As far as the band members being inactive outside the main group, "Music From The Body" is one of the few exceptions. Aside from Syd Barrett's solo records, "Music From The Body" was the only non Pink Floyd album from any of them until David Gilmour's solo debut in 1978. It was almost another 15 years before Waters himself released an actual solo album, which basically has nothing in common with this besides Waters' depressing songs and frail, whispery voice. Again aside from Barrett's records, this is also probably the only outside project of theirs that I would consider a classic. Much like the Pink Floyd albums from this period, Roger Waters and company look back with indifference. It's been hard to suppress the actual Pink Floyd albums since they're marked "Pink Floyd", but "Music From The Body" has almost completely been forgotten. I'd venture that a lot of fans that even enjoy the obscure albums like "Ummagumma" and "More" don't realize this exists. The album is of course, not a Waters solo album, but a collaboration between him and experimental/avant-garde composer Ron Geesin. There's no doubt that it's more his work than Waters. Although it's clear that around this time Waters was more than happy to explore the avant-garde and primarily noise based music, neither him nor anyone else in the band had the background knowledge and skills for this type of sophisticated orchestration. This is further evidenced by the fact that on the subsequent Pink Floyd album, "Atom Heart Mother", the band brought him on board to help arrange the title track, their most sophisticated song to date. "Music From The Body", like so much of Pink Floyd's music from this period, was actually a soundtrack. And just like all that Floyd material, as obscure as this stuff is, the music is far more remembered than the movie. The movie in this case was one of those old school anatomy documentaries where they have the camera crawling around human tubes, showing the practically alien makeup of our insides. This music was a perfect match. It's mostly short, quick tracks. Little avant-garde but musical tracks composed by Geesin. You can imagine moving to different bodily phenomena as the tracks quickly go by. Roger's songs are obvious. Exclusively simple acoustic folk tracks with his depressing lyrics. Very much his style during this period. Here it provides quite a contrast to the madness around it. The rest of Pink Floyd does make an uncredited appearance for the finale. By the sound of the band, it's clearly them, but it's unfortunately not a lost Floyd classic itself. It could almost be described as a half assed appearance, fitting in with the lo-fi nature of the record.