Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma reminded me a lot of Swans’ music.

I’ve been taking a deep dive into Pink Floyd’s discography lately and Ummagumma happened to be one of the last albums I’ve managed to listen to from the band. To my surprise and amazement – as a dedicated Swans fan who has heard all of their studio output and most of the live stuff – the songs on Ummagumma reminded me so much of many a Swans song and the style of their music in general. The album was an unexpectedly dark, trippy, out-there, heavy and experimental listen, and I didn’t know it would delight me to such a degree that I would be compelled to write about it. I was shocked at how advanced Floyd’s sound was in their early years. It’s so different from the more standard kind of rock that they would create later on for which they would become famous. I can conceive of an argument for Ummagumma being a forerunner of certain genres like post-rock. If I remember correctly, I read somewhere that Michael Gira saw Floyd live some time in ‘68 and that he said this event left a deep impression on him. I believe he even said there that Floyd’s music at the time was like “reaching for the unreachable”.

The disorienting, dissonant, chromatic chord progressions and riffs; the wild, unhinged experimental sounds; the creepy, paranoid, anxiety-inducing atmosphere; the long meditative sections that build up to mind-blowing climaxes; David Gilmour’s eerie screeching guitar swells and sweeps, dueling with Rick Wright’s wacky, spaced-out keyboard work – a sound that is strikingly close to the the swirling sonic storms unleashed by Norman Westberg and Kristof Hahn; Roger Waters’ screaming, bizarre animal sounds and random weird noises…so many elements in the album have an almost direct, uncanny similarity to the Swans style that we know and love. I can even make some specific song-by-song comparisons between the songs from Ummagumma and Swans’ catalogue off the top of my head right now. The bassline of “Careful with That Axe Eugene” is strongly reminiscent of the “Screen Shot” riff (I think the two songs might even be in the same key), and Roger’s crazy scream exploding into the crescendo of the song is the sound of a hundred Swans songs.

The main melody of “Set the Control for the Heart of the Sun” reminds me of the dancing-demon-by-the-fire-in-a-graveyard section at the end of “The Seer” (i.e., the “I love you too much” part).  The sustained climax, revolving drum pattern and wild guitar screeches in “A Saucerful of Secrets” makes me think of the relentless surge of “Bring the Sun”; also, the way the song builds up towards the end from a lengthy, solemn organ section into the soaring climax as Roger sings “Oooooooooo” at the top of his lungs is basically the blueprint for the “big sound” era of Swans. Elsewhere, “Sysyphus” sounds like something straight out of the Greed album. More specifically, the foreboding chord sequence of “Sysyphus Part One” resembles that of “Nobody”, and the atonal downtuned piano sounds on “Sysyphus Part Three” are oh so very close to the sounds which can be heard on the exceedingly creepy “Stupid Child”. Lastly, the heavy, discordant crawling riff on “The Narrow Way Part Two” sounds a lot like the main riff of “The Hanging Man”. There may be many more examples that I can’t recall at the moment.

Obviously, Swans is a much darker, heavier, wilder band. But Floyd can get surprisingly dark, heavy and out-there too. Ummagumma might just be their darkest, most experimental and hardest-rocking work. They never sounded the way they did on this album before or since. The influence of this specific record on Swans’ sound may be more direct than we may be led to think. Or, it can also be mere poetic coincidence. But whatever the case may be, if any of you, fellow Swans fans, haven’t yet heard this album – I strongly recommend giving it a good listen. It’s something that a fan of Swans' music can easily find some delight in, in my opinion…