Pink Floyd
Atom Heart Mother

*NOTE: The first 30 seconds (approx.) of track 1 on side 1, "Atom Heart Mother: Father's Shout," play Mint Minus Minus to EX++. Track 1 on side 2, "If," also plays Mint Minus Minus to EX++.

*NOTE: This record was not noisy enough to rate our M-- to EX++ grade, but it's not quite up to our standards for Mint Minus Minus either.

This is an album that rarely sounds any good. We've spent a ton of money over the years chasing British originals and various other pressings looking for that Pink Floyd magic, but the early pressings were consistently disappointing, as are most reissues. If you like this music -- admittedly a big "if" -- I don't think you can find better sound for it.

Atom Heart Mother is from Pink Floyd's early psych years, and it's not a pop album by any means. In truth it's fairly bizarre, kicking off with a side long orchestral piece before settling into songs on the second side. There's a lot to enjoy here, but if you aren't familiar with the album you may want to check it out on YouTube before laying out the big bucks we charge for a copy that sounds as good as this one does.

Vintage Vinyl

This vintage British Harvest pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn't showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to "see" the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It's what vintage all analog recordings are known for -- this sound.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it -- not often, and certainly not always -- but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.

What The Best Sides Of Atom Heart Mother Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1970
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

The biggest problem we ran into with this album is that almost every copy we've played over the years sounded small and lifeless. You can turn up the levels all you want but the music never seems to want to come to life. Thankfully that is not the case with this exceptionally well mastered British pressing. It's quite a bit more dynamic than the other copies we played, which serves to make the music much more involving, even exciting. We noticed that the acoustic guitars on side two sound especially Tubey Magical.

What We're Listening For On Atom Heart Mother

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren't "back there" somewhere, lost in the mix. They're front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt -- Robin Black and Alan Parsons in this case -- would put them.
• The Big Sound comes next -- wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information -- fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
• Tight punchy bass -- which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency -- the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)

Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of other pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don't have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful recordings.

If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that's certainly your prerogative, but we can't imagine losing what's good about this music -- the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight -- just to hear it with less background noise.

A Tough Record to Play

Atom Heart Mother is a difficult record to reproduce. Do not attempt to play it using anything other than the highest quality equipment.

Unless your system is firing on all cylinders, even our hottest Hot Stamper copies -- the Super Hot and White Hot pressings with the biggest, most dynamic, clearest, and least distorted sound -- can have problems. Your system should be thoroughly warmed up, your electricity should be clean and cooking, you've got to be using the right room treatments, and we also highly recommend using a demagnetizer such as the Walker Talisman on the record, your cables (power, interconnect and speaker) as well as the individual drivers of your speakers.

This is a record that's going to demand a lot from the listener, and we want to make sure that you feel you're up to the challenge. If you don't mind putting in a little hard work, here's a record that will reward your time and effort many times over, and probably teach you a thing or two about tweaking your gear in the process (especially your VTA adjustment, just to pick an obvious area many audiophiles neglect).

Side One

• Atom Heart Mother
a. Father's Shout
b. Breast Milky
c. Mother Fore
d. Funky Dung
e. Mind Your Throats Please
f. Remergence

Side Two

• If
• Summer '68
• Fat Old Sun
• Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast
a. Rise and Shine
b. Sunny Side Up
c. Morning Glory

About the Album

Atom Heart Mother is the fifth studio album by the English band Pink Floyd. It was released by Harvest on 2 October 1970 in the UK, and by Capitol on 10 October 1970 in the US. It was recorded at EMI Studios (now Abbey Road Studios) in London, and was the band's first album to reach number 1 in the UK, while it reached number 55 in the US, eventually going gold there.

The cover was designed by Hipgnosis, and was the band's first not to feature their name, or have photographs of them on any part of it. This was a trend that would continue on subsequent covers throughout the 1970s.

Recording

Pink Floyd started work on the album after completing their contributions to the soundtrack for the film Zabriskie Point in Rome, which had ended somewhat acrimoniously. They headed back to London in early 1970 for rehearsals. A number of out-takes from the Rome sessions were used to assemble new material during these rehearsals, though some of it, such as "The Violent Sequence," later to become "Us and Them," would not be used for some time.

Side one

The title track of Atom Heart Mother resulted from a number of instrumental figures the band had composed during these rehearsals, including the chord progression of the main theme, which guitarist David Gilmour had called "Theme from an Imaginary Western," and the earliest documented live performance was on 17 January 1970 at Hull University. The band felt that the live performances developed the piece into a manageable shape. Recording of the track commenced at EMI Studios (now Abbey Road Studios) in London, and was somewhat cumbersome, as it was the first recording to use a new eight-track one-inch tape and EMI TG12345 transistorised mixing console (8-track, 20-microphone inputs) in the studio. As a result, EMI insisted the band were not allowed to do any splicing of the tape to edit pieces together. Consequently, band members Roger Waters and Nick Mason had little choice but to play the bass and drums, respectively, for the entire 23-minute piece in one sitting. The other instruments the band played were overdubbed later. Mason recalled the final backing track's lack of precise timekeeping would cause problems later on. Geesin denied Mason's account and said the tapes given to him for arranging the score were a collage of short sections.

By March, they had finished recording the track, but felt that it was rather unfocused and needed something else. The band had been introduced to Ron Geesin via the Rolling Stones tour manager, Sam Cutler, and were impressed with his composition and tape-editing capabilities, particularly Waters and Mason. Geesin was handed the completed backing tracks the band had recorded, and asked to compose an orchestral arrangement over the top of it while the band went on tour to the US. Geesin described the composing and arranging as "a hell of a lot of work. Nobody knew what was wanted, they couldn't read music …" According to him, Gilmour came up with some of the melodic lines, while the pair of them along with keyboardist Richard Wright worked on the middle section with the choir.During the recording of his work in June with the EMI Pops Orchestra, the session musicians present were unimpressed with his tendency to favour avant-garde music over established classical works, and, combined with the relative difficulty of some of the parts, harassed him during recording. John Alldis, whose choir was also to perform on the track, had experience in dealing with orchestral musicians, and managed to conduct the recorded performance in place of Geesin.

The track was originally called "The Amazing Pudding," although Geesin's original score referred to it as "Untitled Epic." A refined and improved version (with Geesin's written parts) was played at Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music on 27 June. Its name was changed after the band were due to play an "in concert" broadcast for BBC Radio 1 on 16 July 1970, and had needed a title for John Peel to announce it. Geesin pointed to a copy of the Evening Standard, and suggested to Waters that he would find a title in there. The headline of one article, on page 9, was: "atom heart mother named,",a story about a woman being fitted with a Plutonium-238-powered pacemaker.

The piece as presented on the completed album is a progression from Pink Floyd's earlier instrumental pieces such as "A Saucerful of Secrets" and even earlier, "Interstellar Overdrive." The "Atom Heart Mother" suite takes up all of side one, and is split into six parts, individually named. Geesin chose the opening section name, "Father's Shout" after Earl "Fatha" Hines, while other names such as "Breast Milky" and "Funky Dung" were inspired by the album cover artwork. The orchestral arrangements feature a full brass section, a cello and the 16-piece John Alldis choir, which take most of the lead melody lines, while Pink Floyd mainly provide the backing tracks; a reverse of the 1960s pop music practice of using orchestration as the background, and putting the rock band in front.

Side two

The album's concept is similar to their previous Ummagumma album, in that it features the full band in the first half, and focuses on individual members in the second half. Side two opens with three five-minute songs: one by each of the band's three resident songwriters; then closes with a sound effects-dominated musical suite primarily conceived by Mason and credited to the whole group. Waters contributes a folk ballad called "If," playing acoustic guitar. Pink Floyd rarely played the song live, but Waters often performed it at solo shows in support of his Radio K.A.O.S. album, more than a decade later. This is followed by Wright's "Summer '68," which also features prominent use of brass in places. It was issued as a Japanese single in 1971, and was the only track on the album never to be played live in concert. The song was reportedly about Wright and a groupie on tour, and had the working title of "One Night Stand."

According to Mason, Gilmour, having had little songwriting experience at that point, was ordered to remain in EMI until he had composed a song suitable for inclusion on the album. He came up with a folk-influenced tune, "Fat Old Sun," which he still cites as a personal favourite. The song was a regular part of the band's live repertoire in 1970–71, and became a staple of Gilmour's solo set in 2006.

The final track, "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast," is divided into three segments, each with its own descriptive title, joined by dialogue and sound effects of then-roadie Alan Styles preparing, discussing, and eating breakfast. The idea for the piece came about by Waters experimenting with the rhythm of a dripping tap, which combined sound effects and dialogue recorded by Mason in his kitchen with musical pieces recorded at EMI. A slightly re-worked version was performed on stage on 22 December 1970 at Sheffield City Hall, Sheffield, England with the band members pausing between pieces to eat and drink their breakfast. The original LP ends with the sound of the tap which continues into the inner groove, and thus plays on indefinitely.

Original Floyd frontman Syd Barrett recorded his album Barrett around the same time as Atom Heart Mother, with assistance from Gilmour and Wright. He occasionally visited his old band's sessions to see what they were doing.

Artwork

The original album cover, designed by art collective Hipgnosis, shows a Holstein-Friesian cow standing in a pasture with no text nor any other clue as to what might be on the record. Some later editions have the title and artist name added to the cover. This concept was the group's reaction to the psychedelic space rock imagery associated with Pink Floyd at the time of the album's release; the band wanted to explore all sorts of music without being limited to a particular image or style of performance. They thus requested that their new album had "something plain" on the cover, which ended up being the image of a cow. Storm Thorgerson, inspired by Andy Warhol's famous "cow wallpape," has said that he simply drove out into a rural area near Potters Bar and photographed the first cow he saw. The cow's owner identified her name as "Lulubelle III." More cows appear on the back cover, again with no text or titles, and on the inside gatefold. Also, a pink balloon shaped like a cow udder accompanied the album as part of Capitol's marketing strategy campaign to "break" the band in the US. Looking back on the artwork, Thorgerson remembered: "I think the cow represents, in terms of the Pink Floyd, part of their humour, which I think is often underestimated or just unwritten about."

In the mid-1980s, a bootleg containing rare singles and B-sides entitled The Dark Side of the Moo appeared, with a similar cover. Like Atom Heart Mother, the cover had no writing on it, although in this case it was to protect the bootlegger's anonymity rather than any artistic statement. The album cover for the KLF's concept album Chill Out was also inspired by Atom Heart Mother.

-Wikipedia