Astronomy Dominé

Excerpt from ‘Syd Barrett: Lost in the Woods’ by Julian Palacios

On April 11, the Pink Floyd returned to EMI to work on ‘Astronomy Dominé’. Intended as opener for their album, ‘Astronomy Dominé’ was recorded in a colossal 14 takes over a seven-plus hour session. The introduction featured manager Peter Jenner reeling off signs of the zodiac and planets through a megaphone in double tracked overdub. This was an accurate, though unintentional, approximation of the never fully audible chattering voices of schizophrenia. Jenner recalled Barrett had a copy of the Observers Book of Astronomy and wrote out a list on the spot, Jenner intoning the names of the planets and zodiac signs in his best lecturer’s voice in imitation of an astronaut or mission control engineer.

The title, subject of voluminous debate, seems to have stemmed from the Latin phrase ‘astronomi domini’, or ‘master astronomer’, referring to 17th Century astronomer Gottfired Kirch, who observed the great comet of 1686. The earliest reference to the title is an advertisement for the Pink Floyd’s appearance at All Saint’s Hall, and the song is referred to as ‘Astronomi Domini – an astral chant’. On Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the label on the record reads ‘Astronomy Dominé’ and the sleeve reads ‘Astronomy Domine’.

‘Astronomy Dominé’ was a continual work in progress, stemming from Summer 1966, with a skeletal outline of the melody to ‘River Deep, Mountain High’, a big hit for Ike & Tina Turner that June. ‘Over Under Sideways Down’ by the Yardbirds and ‘Paint It, Black’ by the Rolling Stones were also all over pirate radio that month, and seem to have influences the riff heavy core of the song. Barrett tinkered with the song’s construction right until the recording session. Barrett was inspired by a recent pick-up at Musicland on the Portobello Road, issued that week by American garage psychers the Electric Prunes. The A-side ‘Get Me to the World on Time’ was a minor hit climbing Radio London’s chart. Barrett’s was riveted however by the B-side, ‘Are You Loving Me More (But Enjoying it Less)’, whose intro he lifted wholesale for ‘Astronomy Dominé’. There were also traces of ‘Stephanie Knows Who’ by Love, released a month before, with descending guitar phrase and brittle shards of distortion.

Barrett’s Telecaster thunders to life with an ominous staccato riff, while Wright leans in with Morse code like blips (though no secret message) on Farfisa fed through Binson, echoing the Journey into Space radio programs. Mason enters with a drum roll that sets the stage for Barrett’s opening lead, bleeding to the right in the stereo spectrum with a riff resembling ‘Mars, the Bringer of War’ in Gustav Holst's The Planets suite. Not coincidentally, also the theme music to the BBC radio serial Quatermass. The organ, bass and guitar are pushed to fore in the sheer intensity of the statement of the central riff, with thunderous and compressed Rickenbacker bass. Barrett’s frenetic guitar skates over Mason and Waters’ rhythm, with Waters playing swooping bass lines evocative of the Who’s John Entwhistle. Norman Smith lashed on loads of compression to Syd’s guitar, for a markedly different sound from Boyd and Woods, with the midrange leaping out of the mix.

The chord progression was an unusual E E flat G A, free of noticeable antecedents, and harmonically unstable. Like ‘Arnold Layne’s constrained chords, Barrett and Wright restrain themselves to this chord palette and never resolve to C, B or F. Syd and Rick chimed in with a chanting ‘Lime and limpid green ’ set to a droning E that drops to Eb, leaving us hanging in expectation of ‘the second scene ’ Like a roller coaster rising to the summit with slow grinding gears, Syd lands with a thud on G. He backtracks to A before landing back on the opening E for a moment. Leaping back to G gives the false impression of resolution, sweetening slightly to G#, and then he’s off! Awash in delay, Syd dive-bombs into the bridge intoning the names of the moons of Uranus, free falling from fret 12 through the octaves with E form barré chords and then A form barrés. Barrett lands with a full stop on the same E that serves as anchor and launching pad, retreat and point of advance. The band falls away and there we are, in infinite expanses of space.

Sheila Whiteley, in The Space Between the Notes, writes: ‘Barrett then glissandos down for a solo break. Initially this is based on high alternating sustained notes which are bent up and sliding glissandi, fed though an echo box. Echoing strums across the chords are distanced by use of overlay and echo. Underneath the organ holds the supporting harmonies while the bass guitar continues [in a] throbbing pulse.’ Russell Reising, in Speak To Me, points to Barrett’s tendency to take a root chord and slide the chord shape down one fret, adding a blast of harmonic dissonance. Reising writes, ‘technically simple to perform, harmonically these chords are rather complex. Barrett seemed to relish chord changes and key shifts one semitone or one whole tone apart.’ Reising maintains Barrett’s taste for small harmonic intervals in preserved throughout Pink Floyd’s later work, his most obvious legacy.

‘Astronomy Dominé’ drew direct inspiration from Prometheus Unbound, an epic poem by Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley written in 1820. This dramatic poem stands as one of the dizzying crags of the Romantic Movement. In a stanza titled ‘The Song of Asia’, the song of an unseen spirit sings to the Oceanide (or water nymph) Asia, the dramatic expression of love working through nature. From the pages of the 1913 Cambridge Book of Poetry for Children, edited by Kenneth Grahame, Syd Barrett drew from this poem for both ‘Astronomy Dominé’ and ‘See Emily Play’.

My soul is an enchanted boat,

Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float

Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing;

And thine doth like an angel sit

Beside a helm conducting it,

Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing.

It seems to float ever, forever,

Upon that many-winding river,

Between mountains, woods, abysses,

A paradise of wildernesses!

Till, like one in slumber bound,

Borne to the ocean, I float down, around,

Into a sea profound of ever-spreading sound.

Earlier, Shelley portrays a dialogue between Panthea and Ione, two Oceanides or water nymphs, who represent the Spirits of Moon and Earth. In a Forest near the Cave of Prometheus, Panthea and Ione are sleeping: they awaken during the first Song.

Panthea:

Of lovely grief, a wood of sweet sad thoughts;

Two visions of strange radiance float upon

The ocean-like enchantment of strong sound,

Which flows intenser, keener, deeper yet,

Under the ground and through the windless air.

Shelley also translated Streamlets from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Scenes from Faust, in which appears:

A rushing throng! A sound of song

Beneath the vault of Heaven is blown!

Sweet notes of love, the speaking tones

Of this bright day, sent down to say

That Paradise on Earth is known.

Resound around, beneath, above.

All we hope and all we love

Finds a voice in this blithe strain,

Which wakens hill and wood and rill,

And vibrates far o'er field and vale,

And which Echo, like the tale

Of old times, repeats again.

Tu-whoo! tu-whoo! near, nearer now

The sound of song, the rushing throng!

Wright’s swelling organ chord rises, as Syd’s Esquire rings out with a sharp, piercing note, sampled into the Binson, swelling and echoing out and away. Then, with great instinctive musicianship Barrett plays counterpoint to himself, each secondary note ringing out from his guitar a millisecond faster than the ‘sample’ emanating from the Binson. The sampled note degraded with each pulse, vaporizing as Syd brought up the volume and swell knobs to create a cloud of atmospherics. The echo swells to a thunderous climax, arriving at the cusp of distortion before Syd tears away, shredding his strings with electronic slide, like Asia freeing Prometheus from his chains.

Waters drives along with an insistent bass pattern, alternating chords rapidly in a polka or mazurka oom-pah rhythm. A stark solo with thin treble-laden notes and gossamer thin glissandi that approximate a bow drawn across a violin follows, stretching a thin skein of tension. Barrett echoes the mazurka rhythm of the Salvation Army bands on Jesus Green when he was a child. Whiteley wrote, ‘the final entry on D major brings a sense of overall control in its resolution on a perfect cadence.’

A droning organum chant on E emerges in the coda, with Syd taking the low antiphonal chant while Wright harmonises an octave higher. Vocal harmonies of the psychedelic era excel in slight wavers between major and minor to add emotional coloration to an otherwise flat chant. Layered over a two-chord metronomic bass phrase, monotonous and dirge-like, Barrett and Wright intone in relay chorus: ‘Lime and limpid green the sound surrounds the icy waters underground.’ Barrett’s synaesthetic association of sound with lime and limpid green makes for an amorphous tang, like the vivid green algae at water’s edge near the boat yards at Silver Street Bridge. Mind you, the dreaded Mekon was Dan Dare’s direst foe, and had lime green skin. Barrett and Wright accentuate the green sounds of waters underground, with down strokes ringing out. The last word trails to the end of the song, without resolution, hung on an atonal tone somewhere a few cents above or below E. In ‘Lime and limpid green, the second scene, the flight between the blue you once knew' Syd uses alliteration, and 'ee' rhyming sounds before changing direction to 'oo' rhymes - all in the first line. (Editor’s note: Thanks Kieran!)

Tim Ellison wrote in The Band Are Not Quite Right: ‘‘Lime and limpid green, a second scene/a fight between the blue you once knew/Floating down, the sounds resound around the icy waters underground’. Not just discontinuity between lines, but a continual lack of logical structure within the individual lines themselves.’ The lines themselves, one could argue, form the structure, individual words less so. Vivid in calling to mind a phantasmagorical scenario of watery dislocation, the incantation-like quality of the verse floats over the insistent rhythm section.

Discontinuity is a device Barrett would use often to keep the listener disoriented. Syd compounds the assonance and internal rhyming in Shelley’s ode into visual shorthand that expertly conveys plunges into watery chasms of sound. In ‘Astronomy Dominé’ the enchantment is sound. As surely as Sant Mat’s audible sound current radiates from the dawn of the universe, sound is the grand unifying factor in ‘Astronomy Dominé’. The Sant Mat principle of surat shabda yoga meant a union of the soul with the audible Life Stream sent out, as sound vibration, from the Supreme Being at the dawn of the universe.

‘Astronomy Dominé’ sets the tone for the album, which from the first note does the neat hat trick of creating a universe of sound. Through sensation rife with wonder, though also fear. The parrying of distance, opaque colours, water churning underground make Jupiter and Saturn, Oberon, Miranda and Titania seem far from home. Fitting then, given Barrett’s fondness for English literature, the 17 moons of Uranus are drawn from William Shakespeare’s plays and Alexander Pope’s poetry rather than Greek and Roman mythology. Barrett explores the fathomless reaches of space looking for the earthbound and familiar. Oberon, and Titania, of course, were the king and queen fairy in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Barrett was inspired by Old English poetry, where each line is broken into half-lines by strategic breaks or pauses, and accented syllables trigger specific emphasis, cementing tone. In Anglo-Saxon poetry, structural emphasis comes in the form of accentual meter (or alliterative-stress meter). In A Study of English Rhyme, Francis Child, he of the famed Child Ballads, wrote of Anglo-Saxon poetry, ‘There are (usually) two alliterations in the first line and one at the beginning of the second line. Alliteration is the domestic artifice of Teutonic poetry, as rhyme and assonance are of the Romanesque.’ Syd, as ever the ‘Man on the Border’, straddles the two in ‘Astronomy Dominé’.

Collating a ‘stairway scare’ with ‘Dan Dare’ and a spooked ‘who’s there?’ captures the stairway-like ascending and descending glissandi, outer space analogies and homebound frights. In the opening scene of Hamlet, Barnardo approaches Francisco to relieve him from watch duty at Elsinore Castle. Unable to recognize his friend in the darkness, Barnardo cries out, ‘Who’s there?’ setting the tone for Shakespeare’s play. The reference in Goethe’s poem to Echo also could have stirred Barrett’s recall of the legend of Echo and Narcissus.

Ovid, in the Metamorphoses, wrote, ‘By chance, the boy became separated from his faithful band of companions and he cried out, 'Is there anyone there?’ Echo replied, ‘There!’ He was dumbfounded and glanced about in all directions; then he shouted at full voice: 'come!’ She called back to him with the same word. He looked around but saw no one approaching; ‘Why do you run away from me?’ he asked. She echoed the words just as he spoke them.’

Rather than Triton, the moon that fits the list of moons of Uranus and Neptune, Barrett pointedly references Saturn’s moon Titan. The only moon with atmosphere and lakes of liquid methane, Titan is the most Earth-like moon in the solar system. Further, Syd names only Neptune of all the planets, the most aqueous in the solar system, tied to images of the Roman god of water. ‘Operation Saturn’ was a Dan Dare serial that ran in Eagle comics from February 1953 to May 1954. Six-year-old Barrett would have sat on the floor at Hills Road and followed the story over a year. In the serial, Saturn is cold and lifeless, the moons populated by myriad strange creatures. The moons are ruled from the largest, Titan. Dan and Digby escape in the little ship: they have just enough fuel left to reach the outermost moon of Saturn, Phoebe. At first, Phoebe seems a globe of water, but turns out to have a dense, though breathable, atmosphere, in which humans can swim. Sinking the ship down to the real surface, Dan and Digby find that Phoebe is a primitive place, populated by blue-skinned hunters. Barrett sings ‘wooooo!, echoing Goethe’s ‘tu-whooo’ in descending cadence with barré chords zooming down, creating sound pictures of free-fall and creatures jumping up to surprise. Like many of Barrett’s lyrics, ‘Astronomy Dominé’ seems a collation of images mounted on a feeling. Moreover, in ‘Astronomy Dominé’, we find a comprehensive synthesis of his varied inspirations.

‘Astronomy Dominé’ is Barrett’s first work of genius, startling with the imagination of his Binson echo unit tempests and frantic Telecaster squalls. Tension builds by degrees, with the contrast of thin, compressed guitar leads playing off the endless expansiveness of the Binson echoing off into infinity. Barrett mentions Titan, a moon of Saturn, before intoning the names of the moons of Uranus: ‘Oberon, Miranda and Titania.’ Barrett tells us ‘stars can frighten’ and the freefall through the octaves suggest a plunge toward them. As philosopher-scientist Blaise Pascal wrote, ‘the infinities between the stars frighten me.’