Most of my associations with music are tied to visuals. I don’t know if that’s actually very rare at all, but it feels unusual to me. It’s not so much music videos either - though, like most everyone in my general age range certain songs will forever be matched with imagery I first saw on MTV. I don’t think anyone who’s seen the “Sledgehammer” video could ever think of anything else while hearing that song. Sometimes it’s how a song was used in a movie. Sometimes I associate it with a party or a stretch of road at night or the look on the face of a girl I like.
I have a weird relationship with Pink Floyd in this sense. I associate their music with images, but not single images. I don’t associate them with any one thing. I associate many of their songs with many images all at once. And not because of drugs. Honestly. It’s because of my senior year of college.
Believe it or not, I was once considered to be very smart. I did very well in school - well enough to graduate a full semester early. Instead of going out into the real world and finding a job, however, I decided to stay on campus and just sort of...hang out. Now, even with a regular course load you have a lot of time on your hands during college. And when all you’re doing is working in a kitchen two hours a day and auditing one independent study, you end up with a whole lot of time to fill.
If you’ve ever been in a situation like this or if you’ve ever been unemployed or retired, you know that you end up picking up some strange hobbies. And I have picked up some very, very strange hobbies in my time.
One of the strangest of these was synchronizing music with movies. You’ve probably heard of synching the Dark Side of the Moon album with The Wizard of Oz. For most people that’s enough. For me, it was like a gateway drug into this whole world of endless possibilities. There’s actually a whole online community of people who do this as a hobby. Seemingly every popular movie of the past fifty years could be matched with an album. The results, of course, varied. Some produce amusing if incomplete spectacles. Some seemed as if they were audio/visual cocktails conjured up in mind of a crazy person - even crazier than the usual sort of person who got into this kind of thing. Some were quite impressive. What you consistently found, regardless of the quality of the end result, was that everybody gravitated toward Pink Floyd.
There’s a reason for that. A few of them, actually. First of all, unlike me, most of this community seemed to enjoy an herbally enhanced experience. Fair enough. Another reason is that they all know the basic moments of the Pink Floyd discography.thanks to the two highest profile syncs out there: Wizard of Oz with Dark Side of the Moon (colloquially known as The Dark Side of the Rainbow) and Alice in Wonderland with The Wall. There’s actually a third that I’ll come back to in just a moment.
The real reason probably has more to do with the nature of film editing itself. Most movies share similar rhythms as far as the motion of the actors and the cuts between camera shots go. You really start to notice that when you watch a film on mute with no real concern for the plot or the dialogue. There are exceptions, of course. Atypical filmmakers like Werner Herzog and David Lynch don’t really match up to outside music very well (at least not to Pink Floyd). But these exceptions only help to prove the rule: most films are shot and edited in a certain way. They follow a certain code of film grammar. And that grammar matches up remarkably well with the languid, dreamy music of Pink Floyd.
One filmmaker matches up with them so consistently that it borders on being creepy. And that’s Stanley Kubrick. It’s more than just the rhythm of the editing though.It’s the tonality, it’s the common themes, it’s the fascination with psychedelia and dreams. Whether it’s on purpose or not, these guys were made for each other.
You can sync up the HAL segments of 2001: A Space Odyssey with the Wish You Were Here album. Try pairing Meddle with The Shining. Full Metal Jacket lines up shockingly well with Dark Side of the Moon. I’ve always wanted to figure out how to sync up A Clockwork Orange with Animals but I’ve just never been able to select the right place to start. Speaking of Clockwork Orange, the beginning is claimed to have been originally paired with the “Atom Heart Mother” Suite only for Kubrick to decide later on to stick with synthesized versions of classical music. This little piece of trivia, which may or may not be true, helped launch a genuine conspiracy theory among people in this community.
Remember how earlier I mentioned that there was a third so-called “classic” of film synchronized with the music of Pink Floyd? Well that third case involves synching the “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite” section of 2001 with the 23 minute Pink Floyd opus “Echoes.” And the conspiracy is that not only is it an intentional match on the part of Pink Floyd, but that it was actually meant to be the score of the film in the first place.
Like most conspiracy theories, you can at least see the line of logic that would lead one to that conclusion. Kubrick was no stranger to their music - or so people claim. Depending on which fan-produced web page you consult, Kubrick was anywhere from a diehard superfan who owned every album to someone who appreciated the “idea” of Pink Floyd without ever actually listening to their music. But it’s universally assumed that he had at least heard of them (which for some people is enough evidence). You also have the psychedelia connection. If you were living in England and you wanted to create a very modern, very experimental head trip of a film, there’s a good chance that you or someone in your braintrust would seek out Pink Floyd to provide the score. And most of all, when you watch the sync you just feel like it’s true. If life were a Werner Herzog documentary, this would absolutely be the case.
All that being said, it’s probably not true. But that doesn’t diminish how fascinating it is to pair the two. I vividly remember everything about the first time I watched it. Not so much for the incredible coincidences or the foundation-shaking marriage of audio and visual. I remember it for the gang that was by my side for this initial viewing.
I said earlier that none of this was influenced by drugs. That only applies to me. I appreciate that other people would enjoy heightening their senses for this sort of thing. When I first decided to watch this sync I recruited a few people of that mindset whom I thought might appreciate the experience. It also prevented me from sitting in a dark room by myself, which I was doing a bit too frequently at the time in my life. My proposal was met with a touch of skepticism. Even for them this was a strange way to spend an evening.
The ringleader of this group was a guy who went by the name “Pool Troll.” Pool Troll was a short little puff of pot smoke wrapped in a dirty hoody and topped with a shaggy bowl cut. He specialized in rocking out the funk music and captaining all of our intramural sports teams. He once got an “E” on a paper because the professor didn’t want to fail him but a D-minus was more than he deserved. His room, nicknamed “The Stump,” was the Penn Station of pot. Anyone who had a need to blaze, whether after class, before dinner, or during a party, did so in there.
The night we were going to watch, Pool Troll and some of his regulars went up to “The Stump” while I set up the TV and sound system in the basement. These syncs are very finicky things. If you’re off by even half a second you go from questioning the very foundations of sensory perception to questioning what the hell you’re doing with your free time.
Pool Troll and his cohorts eventually floated down to the basement and we simultaneously pressed play on the DVD and the iPod. To give you an idea of how this is supposed to play out, you start “Echoes,” the last track on the album Meddle, just as the final segment of the film begins. “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite” sees the lone surviving astronaut Dave Bowman make contact with one of the monoliths that has appeared throughout the film. He is then transported through the cosmos, triggering the next stage of human development. It’s a mind-bending sequence of camera tricks, surreal imagery, and ideas that are equal parts baffling and enlightening. In the original film, sound in these scenes is essentially split into three parts. The first is music by composer Gyorgy Ligeti which accompanies Dave’s initial journey beyond the stars. Then comes near silence as Dave ages before his own eyes in a sort of intergalactic terrarium. Finally, the film revisits Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra as the journey comes to a close. The ebbs and flows of “Echoes” follow a similar pattern. It feels right. It feels natural. It feels intentional. You find yourself really wanting to believe those “Pink Floyd were supposed to compose the score” conspiracy theories. I was entranced.
As the music began to fade I turned to Pool Troll for what I thought would be expert analysis. Again, this is a guy who once got an “E” on a paper. I asked him what he thought. Before answering he turned to his entourage for a moment of worldless deliberation like a sultan seeking consultation from his viziers.
“It was okay,” he said, perhaps a little begrudgingly. “But I have to admit that I’ve seen better visuals when I’ve smoked, put this song on, and just closed my eyes.” The rest of the gang nodded in agreement behind him. “The music sort of carries its own visuals.”
So maybe I am unusual. Maybe this need to match audio with visual, manifested in synching Pink Floyd with Stanley Kubrick, is something to which few other people can relate. I had always assumed that I could appreciate music in and of itself. But if I was only thinking about music in service to my visual memories, was I really appreciating it? I’d only been thinking about how the music changed the movie - never about how the movie might change the music.
The last seconds of “Echoes” drifted from the speakers as the Star Baby stared at us through the filmy glass of the basement TV. The stoners began to stir. The sync came to its conclusion and I was left with a philosophical question posed not by Kubrick but by Pool Troll.
Then something I hadn’t planned on occured. The album started over. The first track on Meddle is called “One of These Days.” It’s a pulsing, aggressive track with a chest-rattling baseline that still somehow manages to retain the interstellar tone of the rest of the album. And that first measure of reverberating bass hit just as the final frame of the film faded away and the credits began.
I froze where I stood, halfway between the couch and the DVD player. The stoners stared as the title cards flipped onto the screen in perfect synchronization with the song.
When the credits ended and the DVD reverted to the menu screen, Pool Troll, ever the philosopher, summed up the feelings of the group.
“That,” he said, “that was cool.”
Every time I’ve heard that song since, all I’ve been able to think about is standing in that basement, looking at that screen, momentarily entranced by nothing more than white text on a black background.
