Heart Beat, Pig Meat: Pink Floyd's overlooked 'Zabriskie Point' fusion of orchestra and electronics

This track is Pink Floyd’s strangest marriage of highbrow and lowbrow. They recorded a full orchestral score at Abbey Road for Michelangelo Antonioni’s film, then chopped it up, smeared it with tape echo, and layered on that thumping heartbeat and pig-squeal synthesizer. The result sounds like a modernist classical piece being eaten alive by a Moog.

Fans argue it deserves a wider audience because it captures the band at a rare crossroads—still fluid enough to experiment with orchestral textures before Atom Heart Mother made them a hit, but already dabbling in the electronic atmospherics that would define Meddle. It’s also one of the few Pink Floyd tracks where the orchestra isn’t just wallpaper; it’s the raw material being deformed. The piece never made it onto a proper studio album, buried instead on a soundtrack that’s more famous for the film’s controversy than its music.