Of the many things that can and have been said of Pink Floyd’s 1973 masterpiece, The Dark Side of the Moon, one consistently bears repeating: it set a standard for how a rock album could function as a seamless, unified whole. There have been few releases since that meet this standard. Even Floyd themselves didn’t seem like they could measure up to Dark Side’s maturity just a few years earlier. But they were well on their way with 1971’s Meddle.

“Meddle is really the album where all four of us were finding our feet,” said David Gilmour. The observation especially applied to the 23-minute odyssey “Echoes,” the “masterwork of the album — the one where we were all discovering what Pink Floyd was all about.” All four members of the band learned to compose together in the rehearsal room, Nick Mason recalled, “just sitting there thinking, playing… It’s a nice way to work — and, I think, in a way, the most ‘Floyd-ian’ material we ever did came about that way.”

“Echoes,” indeed, was the band’s “first masterpiece,” argues Noah Lefevre in the Polyphonic “audio/visual companion” above. The song was originally titled “The Return of the Son of Nothing” because the band had gone into the studio with “nothing prepared,” Nick Mason remembered later that year. As they struggled to find their way forward after the experiments of Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother, touring constantly, they felt uninspired, calling all their ideas “nothings.” They expected little from inspirations like the “ping” sound that opens “Echoes.”

Instead, they created the most substantial material of their career to date. Inspired by Muhammad Iqbal’s poem “Two Planets,” Roger Waters “wrote lyrics to an epic piece” about being at sea, in every sense, yet glimpsing the potential for rescue and connection. Richard Wright wrote “the whole piano thing at the beginning and the chord structure for the song,” he told Mojo in his final interview, showcasing his serious compositional talents. And the range of tones, effects, and styles that Gilmour pioneered on “Echoes” have become legendary among guitarists and Floyd fans.

“Echoes,” says Lefevre above, changed the band’s direction lyrically and musically, helping them break out of the critical box labeled “space rock.” Instead of  “another song about looking upwards to the stars, Waters looked down into the cold, strange depths of the ocean.” It wasn’t the first time rock and roll had visited what Lefevre calls the “psychedelic underwater.” Hendrix was there three years earlier when he turned into a merman. But Floyd found something entirely their own in their exploration. Learn how they did it in the stylish video above, cleverly synced to the whole of “Echoes.”

Related Content: 

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Watch Pink Floyd Play Live Amidst the Ruins of Pompeii in 1971 … and David Gilmour Does It Again in 2016

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

“Man,” a fellow working the checkout counter at Los Angeles’ Amoeba Music once said to me, “you sure do like Japanese jazz.” His tone was one of faint disbelief, but then, this particular record-shopping trip happened well over a decade ago. Since then the global listenership of Japanese jazz has increased enormously, thanks to the expansion of audiovisual streaming platforms and the enterprising collectors and curators who’ve used them to share the glory of the most American of all art forms as mastered and re-interpreted by dedicated musicians in the Land of the Rising Sun.

High-profile Japanese-jazz enthusiasts of the 2020s include the Turkish DJ Zag Erlat, creator of the Youtube channel My Analog Journal, whose short 70s mix of the stuff we featured last year here on Open Culture. But it was only a matter of time before the musical minds at London-based online radio station NTS broadcast the definitive Japanese Jazz session to the world.

Previously, NTS have dedicated large blocks of airtime to projects like the history of spiritual jazz and a tribute to the favorite music of novelist Haruki Murakami — a Japanese man and a jazz-lover, but one whose America-inspired cultural energy hasn’t been particularly directed toward jazz of the Japanese variety.

“Japanese jazz” refers not to a single genre, but to a variety of different kinds of jazz given Japanese expression. Hence NTS’ Japanese Jazz Week, each of whose bilingually announced broadcasts specializes in a different facet of the music. The first mix is dedicated to the late guitarist Ryo Kawasaki; the second, to traditional Japanese instruments like the shakuhachi, and the koto; the third, to Three Blind Mice, often described as “the Japanese Blue Note“; the fourth, to jazz fusion, one of the musical currents in Japan that gave rise to city pop in the 1980s; the fifth, to pianist Masabumi Kikuchi, who played with the likes of Sonny Rollins and Miles Davis; the sixth, to modal jazz and bop from the 1960s to the 1980s; and the seventh, to free-improvising saxophonist Kaoru Abe, “a true maverick of late 70’s Japanese jazz.”

Japanese Jazz Week also includes a special on spiritual and free jazz as played in Japan “from its earliest stirrings in the 1960s until it reached international recognition in the 1970s.” The 70s, as the international fan consensus appears to reflect, was the golden age of Japanese jazz; as I recall, the heap of LPs I set down before that Amoeba clerk came mostly from that decade. The decade’s players, producers, labels, and concert venues continue their work today, the current pandemic-related difficulties of live performance aside. When the shows start and travel resumes again in earnest, no small number of Japanese-jazz fans will be booking their tickets to Tokyo at once, all in search of an offline Japanese Jazz Week — or two or three — of their own.

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Haruki Murakami Day: Stream Seven Hours of Mixes Collecting All the Jazz, Classical & Classic American Pop Music from His Novels

The History of Spiritual Jazz: Hear a Transcendent 12-Hour Mix Featuring John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Herbie Hancock & More

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Hear a Six-Hour Mix Tape of Hunter S. Thompson’s Favorite Music & the Songs Name-Checked in His Gonzo Journalism

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Where exactly did “heavy metal” start? Like a similar question—“what is the first rock and roll song?”–there’s not so much a direct answer as a spreading of ingredients over a number of years, all of which combine to create “heavy metal,” and its numerous sub-genres that have sprung forth from it. There’s not so much a year of origin as there is a year after which one cannot claim a beginning. (Now that’s a sentence!)

If you’re confused, this quick history by Polyphonic will answer all of your questions, and hopefully turn you on to a few tracks you’ve never heard before.

So what makes a heavy metal track? Well, first you have to have some loud, heavy, distorted guitars. Polyphonic goes back to blues musicians, as so many rock guitarists continue to do, to suggest the guitar sounds of Pat Hare and Joe Hill Lewis as precursors to that sound. Next you have to have some lighting-fast fingerwork all over the frets—maybe the hyperfast riffage of surf rock legend Dick Dale will do?

That’s all fine and good. But we need to get *heavy* in this metal. And it was the Brits who took on this job. Creating a mood and experimenting with sound marked bands like the Beatles, Stones, and The Who, as they tried to out-do each other. When Paul McCartney heard that The Who had delivered the heaviest song so far in “I Can See for Miles” (which now sounds surprisingly twee compared to later Who songs), he sat down with the band and blasted out “Helter Skelter.” Take that, Pete Townshend.

The Beatles weren’t steeped in the blues, but so many other British bands were, and here’s where blues picked up the gauntlet thrown down by these heavy, droning, bass-laden sounds. While the British Invasion bands wore their Englishness on their (record) sleeves, trad- and psych-blues bands like Cream and Led Zeppelin wanted to sound American. Things got louder, crunchier, slower, and darker. They got really dark with Black Sabbath, which named themselves after the Mario Bava horror film, and brought another ingredient to the stew: dark, fantastic, Satanic imagery. Finally, Deep Purple brought the banshee screechings of Ian Gillan as a final part to the puzzle. Put it all together and what you have is heavy metal, man.

Heavy Metal has gone on to delight generations and piss off all the right people at the same time. It’s given rise to a new sub genre every year, and come out of it with a hard-earned respectability.

The above animated video from Pitchfork will get you caught up with the evolution into chart domination and back out into purist obscurity.

And for those who would rather listen to a history rather than watch one, check this out.

Polyphonic hits most of the well known signposts on the journey, but if you think an essential song is missing, let us know in the comments.

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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.