How 'More' and 'Zabriskie Point' Forced Pink Floyd's Experimental Detour Before 'Atom Heart Mother'

Between 1968 and 1970, Pink Floyd didn’t just make two film soundtracks – they treated them as laboratories. More (1969) was their third album and first full commission, written for Barbet Schroeder’s film about a doomed love affair on Ibiza. The band had to produce music that served specific scenes, which pushed them into shorter, more textural pieces like “Green Is the Colour” and “Cymbaline,” and forced them to think about mood over structure. They even included a proto-ambient track, “Quicksilver,” built from guitar feedback and studio trickery.

Then came Zabriskie Point (1970) for Michelangelo Antonioni, a far more chaotic experience. Antonioni rejected most of what they recorded, including an early version of “Us and Them” (then called “The Violent Sequence”). What survived – “Heart Beat, Pig Meat,” “Crumbling Land,” “Come in Number 51, Your Time Is Up” – shows the band stretching wilder: tape loops, distorted voices, slide guitar, and a bluesy jam. The rejection taught them to trust their own instincts over a director’s vision. When they finally walked away from the project, they had a backlog of ideas and a newfound confidence in building extended pieces without visual constraints.

Those experiments directly fed into Atom Heart Mother (1970). The title track’s 23-minute suite uses orchestral passages, choral sections, and abrupt shifts – all skills sharpened by writing to film cues. The B-side’s “Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast”