This entry on the blog exists to make a single statement. There are no tracks on Pink Floyd’s 1973 album Dark Side of the Moon. The track list is a lie, a fiction created by marketers who insisted that there had to be segments and names for all the parts of the life that is lived on the first side of the album that begins with birth and ends with death. Just as these same corporate shills insisted on there being labels for all the width of the lived life that is on the second side of the album, solid transactionalism to total madness.
Unfortunately there are few places where you can hear the album without track breaks, a fact that is quite maddening of itself for those of us who understand that the two sides of the album are intended to be listened to by starting the needle in the groove at the beginning of the first side of the album, listening to the end of that side, and then turning the record over to listen to the other side. A cassette tape works similarly, this is the thing that I always loved about my cassette tapes.
Fortunately Vimeo does have a place where you can listen to full albums without track breaks. Fooled me. I listened, and it’s just another rip of the same CD I own, and a poorly mastered rip at that.
Honestly? I’m still looking into the whole gapless thing. Supposedly it works on Spotify if you pay for Spotify. I don’t pay for Spotify. I do pay for Amazon music and it doesn’t do gapless while streaming. Windows media plays my CD rips of Dark Side of the Moon gapless, and yet Videolan puts gaps in between the exact same ripped files. Amazon will play the CD rips gapless, but not the stream. Go figure. I have toyed with making Dark Side of the Moon and other albums that should be experienced as an album into one long file so as to avoid having to deal with track breaks where no track breaks should be to get past this variability in players and playback, but then I don’t have tracks to start and stop on when inevitably someone interrupts my personal music concert.
That was supposed to be my gift to all of you today. A gapless playback of Dark Side of the Moon. I was awake for a solid thirty hours yesterday. I woke early this morning after a solid twelve hours of sleep. Twelve hours of running, hiding, yelling, screaming, whispering and pleading. All those dreams and other forgotten dreams. A lifetime of dreams as the thirty hours before that had been a lifetime of experiences. I awoke with the words of Brain Damage running through my mind (even though I remembered it as Eclipse before looking at the track list) and I knew what I had to listen to while preparing breakfast and getting ready for a nice morning stroll with the dog.
The lunatics are in my hall
The paper holds their folded faces to the floor
And every day the paper boy brings more
Dark Side of the Moon it is, then.
There is no dark side of the moon, really. As a matter of fact it is all dark.
Pink Floyd
(Clare Torry does sing/say one line in Great Gig in the Sky. You have to listen very carefully to hear it)
Postscript
I can confirm that Spotify does play back gaplessly. This whole experience with trying to listen to Dark Side of the Moon the way it was produced inspired me to quit paying Amazon and to start paying Spotify.
…Just in time for me to wish that I wasn’t paying for Spotify. They gave Joe Rogan a hundred million bucks to be exclusively on their platform. I never have liked Joe Rogan, he’s good friends with Alex Jones and that is a large red warning flag in my book.
Seriously Spotify. You are a music service, not a podcast service. Stick to what you are good at.
