What’s Up With The Massive Pink Floyd Crappy Audience Tape Copyright Dump?

There is a provocative and horrifying new band called the Massive Pink Floyd Crappy Audience Tape Copyright Dump.

I don’t know where they’re from – oh, I love a mystery! — or the details of their recording process, but on the 18 nearly identical albums they’ve just simultaneously released they take a fascinating, mega-lo-fi approach to their oeuvre. My guess (based on my considerable experience producing the ambient found-fi project called Roland Mingwald and His Rockin’ Mackerels) is that the band may have been recorded solely via the “talk back” speaker in the recording studio. Remarkable! In any event, the Massive Pink Floyd Crappy Audience Tape Copyright Dump (or Ma Pink Dump U.K., as they are known to their fan) sort of sound like Lightning Bolt performing Kid A. 

Now, I know what you are thinking: 1) Will those goddamn Charmin Bears stop waving their giant nude red asses in my face every time I watch old Columbo re-runs? My god, it’s like Kevin James doing the pants-less macarena in my living room, uninvited. And 2) Wait, old sport, “Lightning Bolt performing Kid A” doesn’t sound so bad. 

Well, you haven’t heard Massive Pink Floyd Crappy Audience Tape Copyright Dump. Picture this, friend. Have you ever sat at Blackjack table in a down’n’out off-strip casino for 6 hours – I’m thinking the El Cortez, thank you very much — while glumly sucking down a pack and a half of Marlboros, and then back at the hotel you fall asleep with the TV on way too loud, and when you wake up the chipper morning weather girl is BARKING at you and all you can hear through your PROFANE cigarette and Michelob hangover is “Hssshaahhh kaKAH crunch and now MICKEY with the sports!”? And you think, “Advil ADVIL dear GOD where is the Advil?!?” and when you can’t find any, you just drink the bottom third of the Bloody Mary that was sitting by the bed…so, like, ‘magine that NOISE, that inability to take a breath beneath the top one-eighth of your unforgiving, abused lungs, that’s sort of what the Massive Pink Floyd Crappy Audience Tape Copyright Dump sound like. 

“But wait,” you think. “That sounds kinda good. It sounds like you’re describing the Birthday Party of or The Drift-era Scott Walker.” Yeh, except, see, Ma Pink Dump U.K. isn’t any good. At all. Just trust me. You know how sometimes there’s a street party or some kind of event a mile or so away, and when it’s a little humid you can hear a cover band right through your window, only you can’t quite hear what the band is playing except it might be the breakdown bit in “Mustang Sally,” or then again, maybe it’s “Fly Like an Eagle,” or maybe it’s just some goddamn Sheryl Crow song, you can’t bloody tell. And you think, my god, this is as bad as having to listen to Danny Elfman, except nothing is as bad as having to listen to Danny Elfman. 

I couldn’t find much information on the Massive Pink Floyd Crappy Audience Tape Copyright Dump. I figured, well, maybe this is a Weezer nom de plume; after all, this really seems like something Weezer might do, and apparently all these eighteen albums vanish in a month or so, and that’s very Weezer. Except, see, it’s far too lo-fi. So probably not Weezer. Jad Fair, maybe? Naaah, not Jad Fair, I would have heard something about that. Then I thought, “If it’s not Weezer, and it’s not Jad Fair, it’s probably the Claypool Lennon Fagen G.E. Smith Farrago, because recording 18 identical albums in varying shades of extreme Lo Fi sounds like something The Claypool Lennon Waddy Wachtel Dez Cadena Embargo would do.” 

But then a shocking thought occurred to me: what if this extraordinary adventure in repetition (not the fun Neu!/Reich kind) and testing the limits of the listener’s patience actually came from…

Pink Floyd?!?

SO, Pink Floyd, who probably couldn’t agree on the color of salt, have somehow agreed that it was in their interests to release 18 nearly identical crappy-to-very crappy audience tapes from 1973 to prevent them from slipping into the public domain, because GOD FORBID someone else should make money off a version of “Speak to Me” that sounds like it was recorded with a tape recorder inside a vacuum cleaner bag inside the parking deck of the Bridgeport to Port Jefferson ferry. Protecting your copyright with low-key releases of weird material is becoming more and more common: as artists’ catalogs reach the fifty-year mark and beyond, they must do something to keep the stuff from slipping into the public domain. Dylan has become the Van Gogh of this sort of thing, releasing remarkable music in unique ways; and to steer clear of public domain icebergs, over the last few years the Beach Boys have released some truly fascinating stuff that legitimately adds to their legacy. 

But this Floyd dump — roughly 37 hours (!) of material that is almost completely useless to the listener — is actually insulting. There are human people out there who are going to waste precious hours of their life (me!) scanning this largely unlistenable nonsense for something of value. And that wasn’t necessary. Floyd didn’t have to flop this boring dissonance up on streaming services. See, in order to meet the requirements to keep this stuff from entering into the public domain, all they had to do was burn 100 or so CDs or vinyl pieces of each show/whatever it is they want to protect and slip them, without any announcement, into random hardware stores in Poland (Bob Dylan did something more or less like this with his just-barely released 1973 50th Anniversary Copyright Collection, and that contained some genuinely interesting and worthwhile material). Instead, Floyd did the cheapest and laziest thing possible: Stick the glutinous, doughy, hair-filled mass of oily, noisy audience tapes (all so identical in performance that I suppose someone who wanted to take the time could overlay them, likely to semi-interesting effect) up on the sundry streaming services, where they could confuse, aggravate, and ultimately exhaust the listener. (Oh, and we ought to note that 2022’s Floyd copyright dump – 12 live albums all recorded between February of 1970 and March of 1972 – contained some intriguing and historically valid stuff, some of it very decently recorded. But this is not that, not by a long shot.) 

Okay, but is there anything here that’s, uh, actually good or interesting? 

The short answer is no. There’s absolutely nothing here that can’t be heard far, far better elsewhere (notably on the legit — and very good — The Dark Side of the Moon Live at Wembley 1974); there’s minimal variation in set lists amongst the 18 albums; and as trippy as Dark Side-era Floyd might be, there’s no detectable variation in the song performances, so you don’t get that Grateful Dead kinda “Oh look what Phil did in the second set on St. Swithins Day 1978!” type thing. 

But here’s a slightly longer answer, if you really want to scroll through Ma Pink Dump: 

Live at Olympiahalle, Munich, Germany 12 October 1973 has a flat, high end crunch to it that brings out the heavier, treble an’ metal side of the band, to some interesting effect; Live at the Rainbow Theatre London UK (Late Show) 4 November 1973 has the most passable sound quality of the whole lot, but it’s still an audience tape, make no mistake; both Live at Sportatorium Hollywood USA 28 June 1973 and Live at Radio City Music Hall New York USA 17 March 1973 give some idea of the vibe one might have felt in the hall (with the Radio City session having the upper hand – in fact, if you’re gonna listen to any of these 18, I’d give Radio City the nod); and Live at Kiel Opera House St. Louis USA 6 March 1973 is so crappy that it sounds like a terrible audience tape played through a phone. 

I will finish this survey by making special note of Live at Roosevelt Stadium, Jersey City USA 18 June 1973, and here’s why: If I found out that Pink Floyd weren’t actually on this one, I wouldn’t be surprised. The music is so distorted, so distant – honestly, it sounds like it was recorded from inside a nearby Wesson’s — and in many places, the crowd chatter is significantly louder and more distinct than the music. Is that Floyd playing “Careful with that Axe Eugene,” or is it coming out of a car stereo with a blown speaker down the block while people argue over a beer? But there’s something I kind of really, really like about Live at Roosevelt Stadium Jersey City. Seriously. Live at Roosevelt Stadium is less a Pink Floyd album then it is the ambient document of a place and time. Floyd are such a small part of the auditory picture here; Live at Roosevelt Stadium is (far) less a Pink Floyd album than it is a memento of the era rife with the hoarse, dissonant gastric feedback of cheap red wine – Mateus, I’m thinking? – and weed that smells like diesel and lavender soap and tastes like that time you ate potpourri on a dare. The only thing missing from Live at Roosevelt Stadium is people wondering out loud if they’ll get home in time to see Billy Barty on Joe Franklin. Live at Roosevelt Stadium Jersey City underlines that the only way to appreciate any of this stuff – the whole steaming 18-album pile — is as audio document, not as music. 

Listen: There’s an album I love called Ned Rorem’s Piano Album I. It’s an extraordinary, emotional recording, the sound of the reflective and open heart expressed in wood and wire. At the end of each of the album’s tracks, there’s 20 or 25 seconds of silence. This is amazing. It so effectively conjures a place, in fact, two or three different places: what the artist was considering (both the composer, the late Ned Rorem, and the amazing and patient pianist, the very alive Carolyn Enger); where the listener is, as their ear’s soul exists in a miraculously aware place of peace and anticipation; and the great, cold golden glow of the studio, as Enger sat, in Buddha stillness, on the bench, considering the horror and joy of time and the pregnant fullness of emptiness. 

So: Please buy Ned Rorem’s Piano Album I, performed by Carolyn Enger. 

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Tim Sommer

Tim Sommer is a musician, record producer, former Atlantic Records A&R representative, WNYU DJ, MTV News correspondent, VH1 VJ, and founding member of the band Hugo Largo. He is the author of Only Wanna Be with You: The Inside Story of Hootie & the Blowfish and has written for publications such as Trouser Press, the Observer and The Village Voice. Learn more at Tim Sommer Writing.

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