Rush drum­mer and lyri­cist Neil Peart died this past Tues­day at age 67. Trib­utes have poured in from bands like Tool, Foo Fight­ers, and Super­chunk and appeared in the pages of The New York­er, a tes­ta­ment to Peart’s sta­tus as both a musi­cian and writer. Drum­mers of all gen­res revere him, even if they don’t quite get the breadth of lit­er­ary, mytho­log­i­cal, and philo­soph­i­cal ref­er­ences in the band’s dense, epic song cycles.

Nor have Peart’s lit­er­ary admir­ers always under­stood his tech­ni­cal vir­tu­os­i­ty behind the kit. But it was nev­er nec­es­sary to ful­ly grok his bril­liant con­tri­bu­tions to Rush’s out­put to appre­ci­ate them—from his first album with the band, 1975’s Fly by Night, to his last, 2012’s Clock­work Angels. Cer­tain­ly not all Rush fans shared Peart’s one­time fond­ness for the work of Ayn Rand, which influ­enced the band’s 1976 break­out album, 2112. Peart lat­er claimed her work “no longer res­onat­ed with him,” as Annie Zales­ki writes at NPR, and called him­self a “bleed­ing heart lib­er­tar­i­an.”

Yet even fans who loathe Atlas Shrugged don’t seem to feel the influ­ence undu­ly com­pro­mised Peart’s cre­ativ­i­ty. His influ­ences were vast and his “love of lit­er­a­ture and rev­er­ence for his­to­ry deeply informed his song­writ­ing… he became known for his philo­soph­i­cal mus­ings on road life and rest­less souls; cri­tiques of pow­er and greed; fan­ta­sy-tinged vignettes; and inci­sive polit­i­cal and social com­men­tary, cloaked in metaphor.” For all their self-seri­ous­ness, Rush wasn’t immune to humor either.

2012 was all of these things, with a sprawl­ing, epic fan­ta­sy/s­ci-fi, 20-minute open­ing title track, fol­lowed by an ode to pot called “A Pas­sage to Bangkok,” in which Peart names “var­i­ous cities and coun­tries around the world where it is cul­ti­vat­ed,” The New York­er’s Aman­da Petru­sich writes, and pro­claims “We only stop for the best!” Rush could wink at their goofi­ness while also ful­ly embrac­ing it with­out reser­va­tion, in “a kind of fuck-it aban­don.”

Rush assem­bled an audi­ence not by “exten­sive radio play or crit­i­cal adu­la­tion or cor­po­rate posi­tion­ing” but good old word of mouth from dumb­struck fans. They did secure their first U.S. record deal through radio play, how­ev­er, right after Peart joined the band in 1974. Don­na Halper—then a DJ at Cleve­land radio sta­tion WMMS, now an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of media stud­ies at Les­ley Uni­ver­si­ty—played their sin­gle “Work­ing Man,” which “prompt­ly took off,” notes Zales­ki.

Halper explains why Peart earned the nick­name “The Pro­fes­sor,” say­ing that “above all, his lyrics made peo­ple think—Rush fans were lib­er­al, con­ser­v­a­tive, reli­gious, non-religious—but they all unit­ed around their respect for the band and their admi­ra­tion for how Neil could artic­u­late their expe­ri­ences, or give them a new way to look at an issue.”

As a musi­cian, Peart made thou­sands of drum­mers feel the same way. “I still vivid­ly remem­ber my first lis­ten of 2112, when I was young,” Dave Grohl wrote on the Foo Fight­ers Insta­gram page. “It was the first time I real­ly lis­tened to a drum­mer. And since that day, music has nev­er been the same.” Foo Fight­ers’ drum­mer Tay­lor Hawkins had a more suc­cinct state­ment: “Neil Peart had the hands of God. End of sto­ry.”

Peart’s own sto­ry may have end­ed but his musi­cal and lyri­cal lega­cy will out­live us all. See clips of his incred­i­ble per­for­mances over the years above—on stages around the world and the set of David Let­ter­man, in tours de force that show off not only his tech­ni­cal mas­tery, but also show how his drum­ming drew on as broad a range of influ­ences as his song­writ­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Who Are the Best Drum Soloists in Rock? See Leg­endary Per­for­mances by Neil Peart (RIP), John Bon­ham, Kei­th Moon, Ter­ry Bozzio & More

Iso­lat­ed Drum Tracks From Six of Rock’s Great­est: Bon­ham, Moon, Peart, Copeland, Grohl & Starr

Watch John Bonham’s Blis­ter­ing 13-Minute Drum Solo on “Moby Dick,” One of His Finest Moments Live Onstage (1970)

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

Apart from the occa­sion­al Blair Witch Project, scary movies need scary scores. But much like mak­ing a gen­uine­ly scary movie, com­pos­ing gen­uine­ly scary music becomes more of a chal­lenge all the time. By now, even the most timid movie­go­ers among us have sure­ly grown inured to the throb­bing bass, the tense strings, and all the oth­er stan­dard, increas­ing­ly clichéd instru­men­tal tech­niques used to gen­er­ate a sense of omi­nous­ness. Giv­en the ever-grow­ing pres­sure to come up with more effec­tive­ly dread-induc­ing music, the inven­tion of the Appre­hen­sion Engine was sure­ly inevitable. A part of the stu­dio of film com­pos­er Mark Kor­ven, it looks unlike any oth­er musi­cal instru­ment in exis­tence, and sounds even more so.

With a nor­mal instru­ment, says Kor­ven in the Great Big Sto­ry Video above, “you’re expect­ing it to have a sound that is pleas­ing.” But with the Appre­hen­sion Engine, “the goal is to just pro­duce sounds that, in this case, are dis­turb­ing.” What we hear is less music than a son­ic approx­i­ma­tion of the abyss itself, which some­how emerges from his manip­u­la­tion of a vari­ety of strings, bars, wheels, and bows attached to a wood­en box — as ana­log a device as one would ever encounter in the 21st cen­tu­ry. “I orig­i­nal­ly com­mis­sioned the Appre­hen­sion Engine because I was tired of the same dig­i­tal sam­ples, which result­ed in a lot of same­ness,” says Kor­ven. “I was look­ing for some­thing more exper­i­men­tal, more acoustic, that would give me a lit­tle more of an orig­i­nal sound.”

Luthi­er Tony Dug­gan-Smith rose to the chal­lenge of craft­ing the Appre­hen­sion Engine. “You’re deal­ing with things that stir pri­mal emo­tions and feel­ings,” says Dug­gan-Smith of the sound of the instru­ment. Kor­ven thinks of it as “not music in the tra­di­tion­al sense at all,” but “it def­i­nite­ly evokes emo­tion, so I would call it music.” In a com­po­si­tion career more than three decades long,  Kor­ven has learned a thing or two about how to evoke emo­tion with sound. His best-known work so far is the score of Robert Eggers’ The Witch, which no less a hor­ror and sus­pense con­nois­seur than Stephen King has named as one of his favorite movies of all time. “The Witch scared the hell out of me,” King tweet­ed. “And it’s a real movie, tense and thought-pro­vok­ing as well as vis­cer­al.” And as the gui­tar-play­ing, music-lov­ing King under­stands, we react to noth­ing more vis­cer­al­ly than that which we hear.

Though the first Appre­hen­sion Engine was built by its very nature as a unique instru­ment, it has­n’t remained a one-off. The first Appre­hen­sion Engine begat an improved sec­ond ver­sion, or “V2,” and now, accord­ing to the instru­men­t’s offi­cial site, “there is an offi­cial V2+ mod­el which we are ready to pro­duce in small num­bers.” Upgrades include cus­tom mag­net­ic pick­ups, a “Hur­dy Gur­dy mech­a­nism,” and your choice of two dif­fer­ent mount­ing loca­tions for the reverb tank. A hand­made Appre­hen­sion Engine of your own won’t come cheap, and all pro­duc­tion runs will no doubt sell out as quick­ly as the first one did, but if you need to strike true hor­ror into the hearts of your lis­ten­ers, can you afford not to con­sid­er what Bri­an Eno, no stranger to the out­er lim­its of son­ic pos­si­bil­i­ty, has called “the most ter­ri­fy­ing musi­cal instru­ment of all time”?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Creepy 13th-Cen­tu­ry Melody That Shows Up in Movies Again & Again: An Intro­duc­tion to “Dies Irae”

The Musi­cal Instru­ments in Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Get Brought to Life, and It Turns Out That They Sound “Painful” and “Hor­ri­ble”

Nick Cave Nar­rates an Ani­mat­ed Film about the Cat Piano, the Twist­ed 18th Cen­tu­ry Musi­cal Instru­ment Designed to Treat Men­tal Ill­ness

The Strange, Sci-Fi Sounds of Skat­ing on Thin Black Ice

A Big Archive of Occult Record­ings: His­toric Audio Lets You Hear Trances, Para­nor­mal Music, Glos­so­lalia & Oth­er Strange Sounds (1905–2007)

Meet the World’s Worst Orches­tra, the Portsmouth Sin­fo­nia, Fea­tur­ing Bri­an Eno

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include 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.

It’s hard to imag­ine that in the late 60s, the band who would become the most famous of the psy­che­del­ic era was still an obscu­ri­ty to most U.S. lis­ten­ers. Nowa­days “Pink Floyd may be the only rock band that can cred­i­bly be com­pared to both the Bea­t­les and Spinal Tap,” writes Bill Wyman in a Vul­ture ret­ro­spec­tive of their entire cat­a­logue. Indeed, it’s pos­si­ble their sta­di­um-sized pop­u­lar­i­ty has been under­es­ti­mat­ed. Accord­ing to the data, they’ve actu­al­ly sold more albums world­wide than the Fab Four.

But they had to pay dues in the States. “In the last week of April 1973,” notes KQED’s Richie Unter­berg­er, Dark Side of the Moon “reached No. 1 on the Amer­i­can charts. In the last week of April 1970, though, they had yet to crack the U.S. Top 50 after three years of record­ing and per­form­ing.”

Their first singer/songwriter, and lat­er trag­ic muse, Syd Bar­rett, had come and gone after their debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. They were already well into what Wyman describes as the sec­ond phase of “four, or arguably five, Pink Floyds.”

This ver­sion “was one of the founders of pro­gres­sive rock, a psy­che­del­ic, space-rock­‑y, qua­si-impro­vi­sa­tion­al ensem­ble.” They were excel­lent live musi­cians and mas­ters of mood and atmos­phere. But their exper­i­men­tal direc­tion didn’t sell. “At that point, they were real­ly anx­ious to have what­ev­er pub­lic­i­ty they could,” says Jim Far­ber, who co-pro­duced the hour-long TV con­cert film above for KQED, San Francisco’s pub­lic tele­vi­sion sta­tion.

We did not have much of a bud­get. Pink Floyd did the per­for­mance and offered the rights for a cer­tain num­ber of air­ings for prac­ti­cal­ly noth­ing. My mem­o­ry is we paid them $200.

The band played in the emp­ty Fill­more Audi­to­ri­um for a film crew. The venue wasn’t emp­ty because no one showed up. They could draw a crowd and had already played the Fill­more West and toured the U.S. three times. But, “for as strong an under­ground fol­low­ing as they were build­ing in the Unit­ed States,” writes Unter­berg­er, they “were so eager for an Amer­i­can audi­ence that they played a free con­cert at UCLA a week lat­er” after the KQED tap­ing.

The sta­tion, which in 1970 “was more known for Sesame Street than psy­che­del­ic rock,” had already begun to move into con­cert films. “Local icons” like “Big Broth­er & the Hold­ing Com­pa­ny, Jef­fer­son Air­plane, and Quick­sil­ver Mes­sen­ger Ser­vice all got air­time.” But Pink Floyd was some­thing dif­fer­ent indeed. The film, broad­cast in Jan­u­ary of ’71, “got an incred­i­bly pos­i­tive response when we aired it in San Fran­cis­co,” says Far­ber. “After that, it had two nation­al broad­casts on PBS.”

You can watch the full “Hour with Pink Floyd,” as the pro­gram was called, just above. At the top, see the band play “Astron­o­my Domine” in footage cut from the orig­i­nal broad­cast. Fur­ther up, see the six­teen minute “Atom Heart Moth­er,” a tes­ta­ment to how far out Pink Floyd could go, and how much a local pub­lic tele­vi­sion sta­tion was will­ing to go with them. The track opens with five min­utes of aer­i­al footage of the San Joaquin Val­ley, the band nowhere in sight. When Pink Floyd final­ly arrives onscreen, the desert vis­tas con­tin­ue to weave in and out.

In “Grantch­ester Mead­ows,” below, for­est sounds and images intro­duce the song. The effect was to trans­late the mys­tique British lis­ten­ers asso­ci­at­ed with Pink Floyd to U.S. audi­ences just on the verge of being blown away by a very dif­fer­ent-sound­ing band who released Dark Side of the Moon three years lat­er.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Hour-Long Col­lec­tion of Live Footage Doc­u­ments the Ear­ly Days of Pink Floyd (1967–1972)

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

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

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