Nobody knows. But everyone seems to have heard it at one time... If you listen to the very very end of ``Eclipse'', and turn your volume up very very high, you will very very faintly hear some music. This has been pointed out several times, but nobody has ever been able to pinpoint exactly what the song is. Some think it's a Beatles song, others, classical music. And why is it there? A studio trick? Or just sound bleeding through from another studio? Truth is, we'll probably never know.
Apparently, however, the original ``Black Label'' Harvest CD does *not* have this music. Curiouser and curiouser...
``The idea of the prism came from a series of conversations with the band, especially with Roger and Rick. Roger spoke about the pressures of touring, the madness of ambition... and the triangle is a symbol of ambition. Rick wanted something more graphic, less pictorial, something, as he put it, more stylish than before. Floyd's lighting show was regarded as very powerful and the prism seemed a good way to refer to that, and be more graphic at the same time.''
And, regarding the pyramids: ``A larger physical representation of the triangle was the pyramid...perhaps it could be seen as a testament to madness, more 'vaulting ambition.'''
All list the lyrics for Breathe as ``don't sit down it's time to *start* another one''.
Thanks to Terence McShery for pointing this out.
If you listen very closely to the end of the song, you can hear the last low note sort of ``burp'' a bit.
This could be an accidental tape anomaly that the Floyd never noticed when they recorded the song, or they did, but it was so faint that they didn't care anymore, or perhaps it happened long after the tape was finished and the master just got damaged.
Others have argued that Pink Floyd are too much of a ``purist'' in terms of their work and would never have allowed a glitch like that to be distributed without having some reason. What that reason is, however, is anybody's guess.
Also, some people have said that the version of ``Set The Controls for the Heart of the Sun'' sounds much clearer on _Works_ than on ASOS.
These early discs -- which are said to be superior to standard UK/US issues (excepting _The Wall_, which had several problems) -- can easily be distinguished because they have an all-black label side with silver lettering. These Japanese-manufactured CDs are now highly prized by hardcore collectors, both for their vastly superior sound quality and for their rarity. Expect to pay around #20 [20 UK pounds] or so for copies.
"Song Credits and Tracking Differences"
Several changes in the Dark Side song crediting have occurred in some recent releases of the song cycle (Shine On and the audio versions of Pulse). These are:
Song and Original Credits ||| New Credits ------------------------------------------------------------------- "Speak to Me" (Mason) --> Mason, Waters "On the Run" (Gilmour, Waters) --> Gilmour, Waters, Wright "The Great Gig in the Sky" (Wright) --> Wright, Waters
It's interesting that these changes occur on Shine On and the Pulse audio releases, but not the videos of DSoT or Pulse, nor the EMI remaster or the XX Anniversary DSotM CD. I can't imagine that Storm and company aren't aware of these discrepancies, though I suppose it's possible. But assuming there *is* a reason for them...what is it?
The best I (Matt) can come up with -- and I freely admit this is quite a stretch -- is that, for the audio recordings, it's a part of the agreement between the current Floyd and Roger Waters. The reasoning involved would be that Waters was understandably reluctant to have songs he felt strongly involved with used to promote something which he felt was illegitimate. So when DSotM or its component songs are used in conjunction with -- and thus used as a sales incentive for -- post-Waters Floyd material, the current Floyd agreed to give Waters credit for several songs that he did a marginal but still significant amount of work on.
The Wright credit would then be a kind of ``if you get credit for your role on this, Rick should get credit for his role on that'' thing. And when the albums are sold on their own, as the XX Anniversary CD or normal remaster, the original crediting holds. Finally, the video recordings fall under a separate copyright, so this doesn't apply to them, and they use the original credits as well.
This theory would also give an explanation for the differences in the tracking of ``Speak to Me'' and ``Breathe'' on the various releases. On _Shine On_ and _Pulse_ they're tracked separately; on the XX CD, they're together. Let me stress again, though, that this is all just speculation on my part -- it has no basis other than the fact that it matches the circumstances, and I can't think of anything else that does...
"The New Cross-Fade"
The EMI remastered versions of DSotM have an added ``bridge'' between ``The Great Gig in the Sky'' and ``Money'' that all other releases lack. Being first released on vinyl, there was always a gap between the two songs caused by the album break; this gap was perpetuated on the cassette and original CD versions. When James Guthrie, Doug Sax and Alan Parsons went to remaster the album, they also added in a new cross-fade to make the transition flow more smoothly.
Some people claim not to hear the cross-fade, but if you listen carefully, you should notice that the final note of ``Great Gig'' doesn't quite fade out completely before the first coin sound effect of ``Money'' is heard. The cross-fade is subtle, but it *is* there.
(It's worth noting here the obvious but sometimes overlooked fact that all the older albums were created and recorded for vinyl. ``Money'' wasn't just in the middle of DSotM, for example -- it was the start of the second side of the LP.)