The Dark Side of the Moon Project: Watch an 8‑Part Video Essay on Pink Floyd’s Classic Album

Record­ed at Abbey Road stu­dios by Alan Par­sons, who had pre­vi­ous­ly worked on The Bea­t­les’ Abbey Road and Let It Be, Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon broke almost as much son­ic ground as those albums. “The band chose the world-renowned stu­dio, as it was home to, at the time, some of the most advanced record­ing tech­nol­o­gy ever pro­duced – includ­ing the EMI TG12345 mix­ing con­sole,” writes Antho­ny Sfirse at Enmore Audio.

Par­sons made taste­ful yet total­ly spaced-out use, as the Poly­phon­ic video above shows, of syn­the­siz­ers, stereo mul­ti­track record­ing, and tape loops. Then there’s David Gilmour’s leg­endary gui­tar tone—so essen­tial to a cer­tain kind of music (and to Pink Floyd cov­er bands) that gui­tar ped­al design­er Robert Kee­ley has built an entire “work­sta­tion” around the gui­tar sounds on the album, even though most play­ers, includ­ing Gilmour, will tell you that tone lives in the fin­gers.

The album is a per­fect syn­the­sis of the band’s strengths: epic song­writ­ing meets epic exper­i­men­ta­tion meets epic musicianship—three musi­cal direc­tions that don’t always play well togeth­er. The late six­ties and sev­en­ties brought increas­ing com­plex­i­ty and the­atri­cal­i­ty to rock and roll, but Pink Floyd did some­thing extra­or­di­nary with Dark Side. They wrote acces­si­ble, riff-heavy, blues-based tunes that also set the bar for philo­soph­i­cal­ly exis­ten­tial, wist­ful, melan­choly, sar­don­ic, funky, soul­ful, psy­che­delia, with­out sac­ri­fic­ing one for the oth­er.

How the band went from cul­ti­vat­ing a cult under­ground to spend­ing 741 weeks—or 14 years—at the top of Billboard’s albums chart after the release of their “high con­cept lyri­cal mas­ter­piece” in 1973 is the sub­ject of a series of eight videos pro­duced by Poly­phon­ic. See the first, which cov­ers “Speak to Me/Breath,” at the top, and oth­ers below. New videos will be released on the Poly­phon­ic YouTube chan­nel soon.

The approach is an admirable one. Too often the great­ness of clas­sic albums like Dark Side of the Moon is tak­en for grant­ed and glossed too quick­ly. The album’s mas­sive com­mer­cial and crit­i­cal suc­cess seems proof enough. We may not know much about Pink Floyd our­selves, but we acknowl­edge they’ve been thor­ough­ly vet­ted by the experts.

But if we want to know our­selves why crit­ics, musi­cians, and fans alike have heaped so much praise on the 1973 album—and shelled out hard-earned cash by the mil­lions for records, con­certs, and merchandise—we might learn quite a lot from this series.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Pink Floyd’s “Com­fort­ably Numb” Was Born From an Argu­ment Between Roger Waters & David Gilmour

When Pink Floyd Tried to Make an Album with House­hold Objects: Hear Two Sur­viv­ing Tracks Made with Wine Glass­es & Rub­ber Bands

Pink Floyd Films a Con­cert in an Emp­ty Audi­to­ri­um, Still Try­ing to Break Into the U.S. Charts (1970)

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