How 'Ummagumma' Became Pink Floyd’s Laboratory for Future Sounds

After the psychedelic rush of Saucerful of Secrets, Pink Floyd hit a wall. Their 1969 double album Ummagumma was part live document, part forced exercise: each member had to write and record a solo piece with no input from the others. The result is a weird, uneven catalog of genre experiments that directly fed into the band’s next decade.

Nick Mason’s “The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party” is a percussive suite that opens with a flute melody (played by his wife Lindy) and then dissolves into a clattering, free-jazz drum solo with glockenspiel and tape noises—think John Coltrane’s Ascension played on a toy set. Rick Wright’s “Sysyphus” is a classically structured piano piece that slowly curdles into horror-movie dissonance, predicting both the gothic organ of “Echoes” and the icy synth pads of Dark Side of the Moon. Roger Waters’ “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict” is pure tape-loop noise and sped-up vocal gibberish, a direct ancestor of the creepy spoken-word collages on The Wall. And David Gilmour’s “The Narrow Way” is relatively straightforward—a long, slow guitar-and-keys piece that really only hints at the pastoral melodic sense he’d later perfect