Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” Provides a Soundtrack for the Final Scene of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

What hap­pens when you cue up The Wiz­ard of Oz (1939) and Pink Floy­d’s Dark Side of the Moon (1973), and play them togeth­er? You get some­thing mag­i­cal. Or, to be more pre­cise, you get “Dark Side of the Rain­bow,” a mashup that first began cir­cu­lat­ing in 1995, back when the inter­net first went com­mer­cial. Watch “Dark Side of the Rain­bow” (here) and you could believe that Floyd wrote Dark Side as a stealth Wiz­ard of Oz soundtrack–though that’s some­thing the band firm­ly denies. And, we believe them.

But bury one rumor, and anoth­er takes its place. The Vimeo cap­tion accom­pa­ny­ing the oth­er mashup above reads as fol­lows:

It has long been rumoured that Pink Floyd set ‘Echoes’ to the final sequence of Stan­ley Kubrick­’s, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. Two years before pro­duc­ing their album ‘Med­dle’, fea­tur­ing the 23 minute piece ‘Echoes’, Pink Floyd worked on the ‘More’ French film sound­track, where they worked with film syn­chro­ni­sa­tion equip­ment. From there the rumours blos­somed, with Roger Waters being mis­quot­ed as say­ing the band were orig­i­nal­ly offered to do the sound­track (they in fact turned down an offer to fea­ture the ‘Atom Heart Moth­er’ suite in ‘A Clock­work Orange’). Whether or not the rumours have any basis in fact, there is an unde­ni­able beau­ty when watch­ing the com­bi­na­tion of Kubrick­’s intri­cate stop-motion uni­verse, cou­pled with the psy­che­del­ic won­ders of Pink Floyd.

This last thought is sec­ond­ed by phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor Joe Steiff, who, writ­ing in the edit­ed col­lec­tion, Pink Floyd and Phi­los­o­phy, adds this:

A less­er-known mashup is the sync­ing of “Echoes” (from Med­dle) with the final twen­ty min­utes of Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey (begin­ning with “Jupiter and Beyond the Infi­nite”)… [T]he mashup is coher­ent and cohe­sive. The emo­tion­al tone of the music and the images work in near-har­mo­ny, result­ing in a mashup that stands up to repeat­ed view­ings.… Both the movie and the music feed into and expand the sense of mys­tery and unknowa­bil­i­ty that each explores inde­pen­dent­ly.

Watch “Echoes Odyssey” above and see for your­self.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dark Side of the Rain­bow: Pink Floyd Meets The Wiz­ard of Oz in One of the Ear­li­est Mash-Ups

Hear Lost Record­ing of Pink Floyd Play­ing with Jazz Vio­lin­ist Stéphane Grap­pel­li on “Wish You Were Here”

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Sings Shakespeare’s Son­net 18