Why 'Ummagumma' Defenders Love the Weirdest Studio Sides

The studio half of Ummagumma is usually called self-indulgent nonsense, but a stubborn subset of fans sees it as Pink Floyd’s most unhinged artistic statement. Because it’s that rare thing: a major-label album where each member got to make their own weird solo piece with zero band veto. That freedom produced Richard Wright’s “Sysyphus” and Nick Mason’s “The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party” — two tracks that most casual listeners skip, but obsessives defend as genuinely bold experiments.

Wright’s “Sysyphus” is a four-part piano suite that starts with a delicate, almost Satie-like melody and then mutates into distorted tape loops, dissonant orchestral stabs, and a climactic freakout that sounds like a cathedral organ falling down stairs. Fans argue it’s Wright trying to be Bartók and Stockhausen at the same time — not fully succeeding, but trying something no one else in the band would touch. Meanwhile, Mason’s “The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party” is a percussion-and-flute piece built around polyrhythms, tape manipulation, and a long drum solo that’s less rock and more ethnographic field recording. Defenders say it’s the purest expression of Mason’s fascination with rhythm as texture rather than timekeeping.

What makes these tracks beloved by a minority is precisely what makes them hated by the majority: they sound like homework. But that’s the point. Ummagumma defenders treat the studio disc as a library of dead ends — a record of each artist trying to escape the band’s gravitational pull