This is all the more fascinating when you consider that the only instruction given to the artists Hipgnosis (long-time Pink Floyd collaborators Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson) by the band (and then only keyboardist Richard Wright) was to “ do something clean, elegant and graphic.” Yes, the cover is all of these, but also, and rather unintentionally, they gave us much, much more. To hear the softly spoken magic spells indeed… A circular narrative of existence and energy played out on a record cover by a symbol that seems to have been plucked from an archaic, occult enchantment, like strange markings in a cave from thousands of years ago that still ring with electric energy, made concrete by being made modern in form and colour, housing songs of great depth and simplicity by four otherwise unassuming Englishmen. The spectrum travels across the gatefold and onto the back cover where it enters another prism, where the spectrum is dispersed once more into the beam of light to travel and merge back into its source on the front cover. An unflinchingly black background, perhaps space, perhaps not, provides a hushed, mysterious canvas for a kind of magic to occur before our very eyes beam of light enters a prism, godlike in its bearing, and is disbursed in a spectrum of colours. ![]() It’s as stark, clean, totemic and ambiguously powerful as the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
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