Mr. Sulu, set the controls for the heart of the moon? The mission? Another visit to Floyd’s lunar landing. So where are we boldly going this time? Well there’s the Discovery edition which is a digital remaster, a live performance of the album from Wembley 1974 and the much more alluring Immersion edition. The latter, replete with early demos and previously (officially) unreleased tracks, allows for new views through the prism.
‘Breathe’ has a different intro with the sampled voices removed. You can almost here the wheels turning, “hmmm, we need something...” ‘The Great Gig In The Sky’ has Clare Torry’s non-lexical sonic wails absent and Richard Wright’s ivories pushed centre-stage transforming bombast into stark lament – less a meditation on death and madness than a resigned sadness at the inevitability of the end as we drift to nothingness.
‘Money’ has a slightly altered solo. Mellow tremelo is replaced by a pinched acidic tone dripping with disgust. ‘Us And Them” is stripped bare displaying a more melancholic hew than the come-together-depression-descension of floating sky and twisting cloudscapes.
Extras and unreleased tracks include ‘The Travel Sequence’ and an almost unrecognisable trippy tourniquet blues version of ‘Any Colour You Like’.
Next stop? ‘Dark Side Of Oz’ anybody?