The tracks are: “Survivalism”(the forthcoming single,) “My Violent Heart” and “Me, I’m Not”. It’s these last 2 which were discovered on USB drives in toilet cubicles at a couple of recent gigs. The files are all 320 kbit/s CBR MP3s and I’ve had the 3 of them on repeat. I can’t wait until the final album is released!

One of the comments on the pink noise post led me to download a little app which generates a wave file containing 12 seconds of the stuff. A hop, skip and a jump over to SourceForce enriched me with a copy of Audacity which enabled me to copy-and-paste to my wee hearts delight and voila, 50 minutes of pink noise in an mp3 sandwich which I swiftly transfered to my iPod. Powerful.

I’m listening to it now while I’m writing this post. It reminds me of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music and like MMM, I don’t know if I like it and I may well either be sick or go mad.

Now if I only had some duct tape…

His death occurred on friday 7th (as a result of complications due to diabetes) and was reported on tuesday 11th and I can definitely say he will be missed, goodness knows I know I feel a sense of loss.

Syd has been a musical hero of mine since I was a teenager and I got turned onto the Pink Floyd. Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall and Animals were the first few albums of theirs I had and I decided that I wanted to get more into their work, starting from the beginning. The first time I heard the 1967 masterpiece The Piper at the Gates of Dawn was amazing; from the mad slide-guitar on the opening track “Astronomy Domine” to the wonderfully spaced-out “Interstellar Overdrive” and finalizing with the whimsical “Bike” (a song I am fond of strumming and singing when the muse takes me), the whole album fitted in so well with the lysergic-state I was in back then.

I got his first solo-album, The Madcap Laughs and read some biographies. I progressed to his second album, the out-takes and his session for John Peel. I learned to play some of his songs, the first domain I registered (ahsydbiscuit.co.uk) was a nod in his direction and when I updated the design of this site last month I included an image of the Great Man himself.

Syd’s descent into madness and his status as the archetypical acid-casualty always rang true with me, especially when I ended up having to go through a similar process myself and up until I got into recovery God only knows the number of times I thought the insanity had me for good. It always saddened me that Syd had went further than myself and never came back.

So now we know that Syd’s seclusion will never end, that he has reached the end of his journey. Random Precision indeed.