How Pink Floyd's Film Soundtracks Fueled Their Experimental Peak

Between 1969 and 1972, Pink Floyd essentially used film scores as a laboratory. The assignments for More (1969), Zabriskie Point (1970), and La Vallée (1972) let them ditch the pressure of a conventional album cycle and just mess around with tape loops, field recordings, and long instrumental passages. On More, they were still leaning on Syd-era psychedelic pop, but tracks like “Quicksilver” and “Main Theme” show them stretching out with eerie piano and drifting organ — a prototype for the ambient sections of Meddle and Echoes.

Zabriskie Point was a total sandbox. They recorded hours of material for Michelangelo Antonioni’s film, most of which got rejected, but what survived is pure avant-garde: the screaming guitar feedback of “Come in Number 51, Your Time is Up,” the slow-burn percussion and spoken word of “Crumbling Land.” The rejected bits later gave them ideas for The Dark Side of the Moon — that album’s earliest seeds were planted in these soundtrack sessions, with Richard Wright experimenting with tape loops and Gilmour layering slide guitar over nothing but silence and wind.

La Vallée (also called Obscured by Clouds) is the most underrated of the three. It’s tighter and more song-based, almost a dry run for Dark Side: “Free Four” has Nick Mason’s first lead vocal and Roger Waters exploring mortality over a folk-rock groove. The whole process taught them how to build mood without words, how to let a scene dictate a structure, and how to throw out what didn’t fit. That ruthless editing sense — cutting a 20-minute jam down to three minutes — carried straight into Dark Side’s economy. The soundtracks weren’t side projects; they were the crash course in making psychedelia cinematic.