Recording for the first time on a 16-track tape machine, the band were able to use overdubs to create different sections of a longer song, rather than having to record at least the rhythm section in more or less one pass. As with Atom Heart Mother, the long work took up one whole LP side, in this case Side 2 of Meddle, with shorter songs on the other side. This became ‘Echoes’, the place which Floyd members subsequently felt was the jumping-off point for the thematically linked albums that were to become their forte. After a period of time of developing the elements, during which the amorphous piece changed its title from ‘Son Of Nothing’ to ‘Return Of The Son Of Nothing’, they gradually built up a structure that began with a ‘ping’ – a single note from Richard Wright’s acoustic piano, fed through the rotating Leslie speaker from a Hammond organ, and redolent of the Asdic return when a submarine is hunting underwater. That experiment wasn’t a success, so they got stuck into collaborating on various fragments of music, ending up with some 30 or so of them, all of which were called ‘Nothing’. ![]() Having experimented with various sounds and styles on their previous albums, they decided to try taping different individual ideas separately, without reference to each other’s contributions, and see how the results worked when mixed together. At the start of 1971 Pink Floyd were somewhat at a crossroads, musically.
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