‘Echoes’: Pink Floyd’s homage to Terry Riley
Most Pink Floyd songs tend to feel like they’re being beamed from another planet entirely. Aside from their flirtations with space rock during the mid-1960s, half of the band’s greatest material tends to speak to the other side of consciousness, whether it’s about the vast intricacies of life or telling a graphic story of a child’s life on The Wall. Although the band have been more than happy to pick at what made rock music important in the first place, their influences stretched far beyond the likes of Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry.
Throughout their tenure, every member of Pink Floyd brought their unique spin to rock and roll, some of which didn’t necessarily cater to the sounds of blues and rock. When first signing on, Richard Wright was still enamoured with the sounds of jazz music, even incorporating different pieces of his roots into albums like Dark Side of the Moon.
Outside of the genre labels, Terry Riley was also beginning to have a massive impact on where rock would be going. While not the usual influence on rock stars, Riley’s approach to minimalist work was structured around capturing the sounds in the studio just as much as the music being played.
When listening to his various musical experiments through the 1960s, it’s easy to see the setting in which the music is being performed just as much as the core notes, almost like Riley is using the spare arrangement to take the listener to another place. Before Pink Floyd had started to make their answers to Riley, Pete Townshend had already started pushing rock into the avant-garde with The Who.
Naming the song ‘Baba O’Riley’ in tribute to the composer, Townshend would take the lessons from Riley for the synthesiser parts on ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, creating a tapestry of sound that sounded like the future being beamed into the modern age. While Pink Floyd experimented with synthesisers, it wasn’t until the song ‘Echoes’ that Riley’s influence truly took hold.
First springing to life after Wright was messing around on the synthesiser, the desolate sounds of the keyboard would serve as the muse for the rest of the song. Plunging the listener deep into the ocean’s depths, most of the song is coated in Riley’s work, from the open chords played during the melodic sections to the massive noise emanating from every speaker.
Towards the song’s midsection, though, Floyd took the lessons of Riley to heart. To capture the feeling of sinking into the depths of the water, the musicians drop their usual scales altogether to create different sonic experiments. To simulate the feeling of studio experiments, David Gilmour would later be seen putting his guitar through a series of challenges onstage, using different sounds of the slide guitar to create a siren at one moment and a whale the next.
The true star of the show comes from Roger Waters’s lyrics, though, talking about the fragility of the human condition and how important empathy is in the modern age for people to relate to one another. While Pink Floyd would take this mentality into their classic albums like Wish You Were Here and Animals, Riley was the one who permitted them to go as far outside the box as they could when working on a song.
