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: 

Watch the Last, Tran­scen­dent Per­for­mance of “Echoes” by Pink Floyd Key­boardist Richard Wright & David Gilmour (2006)

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

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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A 30-Minute Intro­duc­tion to Japan­ese Jazz from the 1970s: Like Japan­ese Whisky, It’s Under­rat­ed, But Very High Qual­i­ty

Hear Enchant­i­ng Mix­es of Japan­ese Pop, Jazz, Funk, Dis­co, Soul, and R&B from the 70s and 80s

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

Hear a 9‑Hour Trib­ute to John Peel: A Col­lec­tion of His Best “Peel Ses­sions”

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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Dev­il­ish His­to­ry of the 1980s Parental Advi­so­ry Stick­er: When Heavy Met­al & Satan­ic Lyrics Col­lid­ed with the Reli­gious Right

Watch Heavy Met­al Park­ing Lot, the Cult Clas­sic Film That Ranks as One of the “Great Rock Doc­u­men­taries” of All Time

Punk & Heavy Met­al Music Makes Lis­ten­ers Hap­py and Calm, Not Aggres­sive, Accord­ing to New Aus­tralian Study

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.