Classic Album Sundays Edinburgh – Pink Floyd “The Dark Side of the Moon”

All spaces for this event are now booked! Due to the massive response we will be holding another CAS event at The Mill very soon. Many thanks, the Loud & Clear and CAS team.

Classic Album Sundays: A Communal and Audiophile Listening Experience is joining forces with Loud & Clear for its debut in Edinburgh.

Pink Floyd “The Dark Side of the Moon”

Sunday 19 August 2012
Tickets £6 (1 ticket admits 2 people to this debut session)
Pay on the door, or guarantee your place online from:
https://loudandclear.eventbrite.com/
Midday – 4pm (album plays at 2.30pm)
Loud & Clear, Bonnington Mill, 72 Newhaven Road, Edinburgh, EH6 5QG

Info:
edinburgh@loud-clear.co.uk
0131 555 3963

This event is part of Loud & Clear’s Edinburgh Festival open weekend, running from Friday 17th – Sunday 19th August, with live music, the finest hi-fi in town and a pop up shop from specialist vinyl retailers Diverse Vinyl.

“One of the world’s great albums, played on one of the world’s finest hi-fi systems in conjunction with one of the world’s best hi-fi stores.”

Classic Album Sundays:

Listed as one of the Top 20 Trends of 2012 by London’s ES Magazine, Classic Album Sundays has become a media sensation in a little over a year. With features on BBC Breakfast, BBC 6 Music, NME, Elle, The Word, The Independent, The Evening Standard and more. Why all the fuss?

The concept is to enable people to experience music as close as possible to the way the artist intended, to treat music as a precious commodity and a classic album as a work of art which should be appreciated in its entirety. Classic Album Sundays’ use audiophile hi-fi equipment to ensure an awe inspiring listening experience. Visitors are invited to switch off their phones and refrain from unnecessary conversation just sit back, listen and immerse themselves in the experience.

Music fans have enthusiastically responded en masse as Classic Album Sundays’ monthly listening sessions in London and New York have been selling out, with festival sessions featuring at The Vintage Festival at the Royal Festival Hall in London (for which Loud & Clear put together a £130,000 hi-fi system), plus Camp Bestival and Bestival amongst others.

Here is what some visitors had to say:

Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” was our first visit, and it was excellent. Sounded as if Joni was playing live, and heard in reverential silence by a deeply appreciative audience.” – David Lye, CAS attendee

“Hearing that fabulous cello line in ‘Eleanor Rigby’ – I could’ve wept with the sheer beauty of it.” – Annette Corbette, CAS attendee

The event format:

Join us from Midday to get in the mood by listening to some of the music that inspired Pink Floyd, along with tracks from their musical contemporaries around the release of the album in 1973.

Refreshments will be provided, so you can sit down and relax or flick through some records in Diverse Vinyl’s pop-up shop.

At 2.30pm the lights go down, the volume goes up and we play the album from beginning to end on a reference MOON hi-fi System. This £90,000 plus audio system will include a MOON 850P pre-amplifier, MOON 880M mono block power amplifiers, MOON 810LP phono stage, VPI Classic 3 Turntable and Focal Scala Utopia loudspeakers, all cabledwith the new Nordost Norse 2 range. This is a SERIOUS high-end system!

Pink Floyd – The Dark Side of the Moon:

How did an album about mental illness, mortality and the need for human empathy become one of the most classic, iconic albums of all time staying on the US Billboard Charts for 741 weeks (14 years)?

With their album “Meddle” and the side-long masterpiece “Echoes”, Pink Floyd had established themselves as an anonymous super-group in an age of flamboyant rockers like Led Zeppelin and The Who. After the departure of Syd Barrett, Roger Waters had increasingly asserted himself as musical director and “The Dark Side of the Moon” was the first album for which he dictated all the themes and wrote all the lyrics.

Written in a direct way, Waters reflected, “Its driven by emotion. There’s nothing plastic about it, nothing contrived” and called it “an expression of political, philosophical, humanitarian empathy that was desperate to get out.”

The album was recorded and engineered by Alan Parsons at Abbey Road Studios where the band liked to play cricket matches against the staff. The band pushed the limits of 16-track analogue studio technology and used keyboards, sequencers and sound effects which were groundbreaking at the time.

The sonics on the album are just as important as the lyrics and each reinforce the other as David Gilmour explains, “Roger and Nick tend to make the tapes or effects like the heartbeat on the LP… The heartbeat alludes to the human condition and sets the mood for the music, which describes the emotions experienced during a lifetime. Amid the chaos there is beauty and hope for mankind. The effects are purely to help the listener understand what the whole thing is about.”

Waters described the urgent message behind the album: “This is not a rehearsal. As far as we know – and I know there are some Hindus that would disagree with this – you only get one shot, and you’ve got to make choices based on whatever moral, philosophical or political position you may adopt…If ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ is anything, it is an exhortation to join the flow of the river of natural history in a way that’s positive…”