The Music Will Never Stop 78

The next tape was No. P, labeled “Pink Floyd/2001/Harp,” with a sticker on the box saying “NEEDS EDITING.”

Not really all that helpful. And the enclosed track listing, hand-written on lined paper, wasn’t great, either — it has counter numbers for thirteen items for over three hours of tape. It only has five titles matched to those thirteen numbers, and one of them is wrong.

The quality here is… not terrible, but still leaves much to be desired.

I immediately recognized three of the titled tracks (“Careful with that Axe, Eugene,” “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,” and “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict”) as being from Pink Floyd’s “Ummagumma.” A fourth titled track says it’s “Kingfisher,” but upon looking up the track list for “Ummagumma” I see the actual title is “Grantchester Meadows.” And five of the blank counter numbers line up with the other five tracks on that two-record set.

“Ummagumma” starts at 384. From 000 to 384 is listed as a single track, which is silly. It took me awhile to identify what’s actually there, but by playing the 30-second samples on Amazon I was eventually able to nail it down as “Atom Heart Mother.”

Now, if those albums weren’t readily available, the quality here is just barely good enough that I’d take them off the tape; I might do some head-cleaning and degaussing and see if I could get a cleaner copy first. But as it happens, they are available for download at reasonable prices, so I’m going to do that instead and save myself a lot of work.

That covers all of Side 1, and the first chunk of Side 2 — this tape, while allegedly the same 1800 feet as the others, ran short. Oh, and the “needs editing” probably refers to a fragment of “Sisyphus” at the end of Side 1; the complete piece starts Side 2.

After the end of “Ummagumma” is the soundtrack album for “2001: A Space Odyssey” — and it’s the same one I had on vinyl and already transferred months ago. The LP was a bit scratchy in places, but it’s still a little better than the tape. (Side 2 of the tape has noticeably better sound than Side 1.) No need to make another copy.

(The last track listing is for “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” by the way — there are no counter numbers or titles for anything after that.)

And after “2001,” there’s a chunk of harp music I quickly identified as C.P.E. Bach’s Sonata in G Major, and then Johann Dussek’s Sonata in C Minor. It cuts off partway through, though, when the tape ran out. But it doesn’t matter; those are off the Nonesuch album “Four Centuries of Music for the Harp,” which was one of the LPs in my collection, and I got a near-perfect copy from the LP last year.

So I already have “2001” and the harp music, and I’m going to go download the two Floyd albums right after I post this. No need to save anything from the tape.

Next in the stack is labeled “TV Concert.” I have no idea what’s on it.

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