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Rediscovering Pink Floyd’s ‘Atom Heart Mother’ Special Edition You’ve Been Waiting For

Eric Alper
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Rediscovering Pink Floyd’s ‘Atom Heart Mother’ Special Edition You’ve Been Waiting For

Pink Floyd fans, rejoice! On December 8, 2023, the legendary band released an expanded Special Edition of their groundbreaking 1970 album, Atom Heart Mother. This highly anticipated release isn’t just about revisiting the music; it offers a rare glimpse into the band’s first performance in Japan at the iconic Hakone Aphrodite Festival in 1971. With newly upgraded Blu-ray footage, behind-the-scenes moments, and exclusive memorabilia, this set is a must-have for any Pink Floyd aficionado.

The Blu-ray includes rare footage of Pink Floyd performing the Atom Heart Mother suite live at Japan’s first outdoor rock festival, set against the picturesque backdrop of Hakone Ashinoko Lake. Fans will also enjoy scenes from the band’s travels, including their journey to the venue, press conferences, and candid behind-the-scenes moments.

Adding to the magic is a 60-page photo book brimming with rare, never-before-seen photos, replicas of the original event’s pamphlet, map, ticket, and poster—each a piece of history lovingly preserved for this release.

Originally released in October 1970 as Pink Floyd’s fifth studio album, Atom Heart Mother marked a pivotal moment in the band’s evolution. The album’s orchestral arrangements and experimental compositions bridged their early psychedelic sound with the iconic style that would culminate in classics like The Dark Side of the Moon. This Special Edition serves as both a tribute to and a rediscovery of a pivotal era in Pink Floyd’s storied career.

The Special Edition stays true to the brilliance of the original Atom Heart Mother album while offering bonus content that amplifies its legacy. Here’s the full tracklist:

CD:

  1. Atom Heart Mother:
    a) Father’s Shout
    b) Breast Milky
    c) Mother Fore
    d) Funky Dung
    e) Mind Your Throats Please
    f) Remergence
  2. If
  3. Summer ’68
  4. Fat Old Sun
  5. Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast:
    a) Rise And Shine
    b) Sunny Side Up
    c) Morning Glory

Blu-ray:

  1. Atom Heart Mother (Live: Hakone Aphrodite 1971) – 16:08
  2. Scott & Watts (Behind-the-Scenes Documentary Clip) – 3:11

 

5 Surprising Facts About Bob Dylan’s “Infidels”

Eric Alper
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5 Surprising Facts About Bob Dylan’s “Infidels”

Bob Dylan’s Infidels, released on October 27, 1983, stands as one of his most intriguing and polarizing albums. Produced by Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits fame, this record marked Dylan’s return to secular music after a trio of gospel-inspired albums. While it received critical acclaim and commercial success, Infidels also holds secrets and quirks that even the most devoted Dylanologists may have overlooked. Here are five surprising facts about Infidels that will deepen your appreciation for this iconic album.

1. Dylan Wanted David Bowie to Produce It
Before Mark Knopfler came on board, Dylan approached David Bowie, Frank Zappa, and Elvis Costello to produce Infidels. Imagine the wildly different album we might have heard had Bowie brought his avant-garde flair or Zappa infused his satirical edge. Knopfler ultimately got the gig, blending Dylan’s raw sound with a refined, guitar-driven production.

2. The Mystery of “Blind Willie McTell”
“Blind Willie McTell” is widely regarded as one of Dylan’s finest songs, yet it didn’t make the Infidels final cut. Despite its hauntingly beautiful tribute to blues history and its biting social commentary, Dylan chose to leave it off the album. Fans still debate this decision, with some believing Dylan felt the song was too personal or incomplete.

3. A Reggae Backbone
Dylan recruited legendary reggae rhythm section Sly & Robbie for the album. Their grooves can be felt throughout tracks like “Jokerman” and “Union Sundown,” giving Infidels a unique sonic texture that stands apart from Dylan’s earlier works. Their inclusion reflects Dylan’s deep appreciation for reggae and global music influences.

4. Space Travel Criticism in “License to Kill”
The song “License to Kill” has baffled listeners with its critique of humanity’s obsession with space exploration, highlighted in the line: “Man has invented his doom / First step was touching the moon.” Dylan later admitted he wasn’t entirely sure why he wrote it, but the skepticism aligns with broader themes of environmental degradation and human hubris explored on the album.

5. The First Digital Dylan Album
Infidels was recorded and mixed entirely on digital equipment, a groundbreaking move for Dylan in 1983. This decision gave the album a crisp and modern sound, distinguishing it from the analog warmth of his earlier records. It also marked Dylan’s embrace of new technology, even as he wrestled with its implications in his lyrics.

 

Alyxandra Vesey’s Book “Extending Play” Explores How Female Musicians Navigate Gender Inequality Through Branding

Eric Alper
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0
Alyxandra Vesey’s Book “Extending Play” Explores How Female Musicians Navigate Gender Inequality Through Branding
Despite the hypervisibility of a constellation of female pop stars, the music business is structured around gender inequality. As a result, women in the music industry often seize on self-branding opportunities in fashion, cosmetics, food, and technology for the purposes of professional longevity.
The new book, Extending Play: The Feminization of Collaborative Music Merchandise in the Early Twenty-First Century by Alyxandra Vesey examines the ubiquity of brand partnerships in the contemporary music industry through the lens of feminized labor, to demonstrate how female artists use them as a resource for artistic expression and to articulate forms of popular feminism through self-commodification.
In this book, Vesey examines this type of promotional work and examines its proliferation in the early 21st century. Though brand partnerships exist across all media industries, they are a distinct phenomenon for the music business because of their associations with fan club merchandise, concert merchandise, and lifestyle branding, often foregrounding women’s participation in shaping these economies through fan labor and image management.
Through textual and discourse analysis of artists’ songs, music videos, interviews, social media usage, promotional campaigns, marketing strategies, and business decisions, Extending Play investigates how female musicians co-create branded feminine-coded products like perfume, clothes, makeup, and cookbooks and masculine-coded products like music equipment as resources to work through their own ideas about gender and femininity as workers in industries that often use sexism and ageism to diminish women’s creative authority and diminish the value of the recording in order to incentivize musicians to internalize the demands of industrial convergence.
By merging star studies, popular music studies, and media industry studies, Extending Play proposes an integrated methodology for approaching contemporary cultural history that demonstrates how female-identified musicians have operated as both a hub for industrial convergence and as music industry professionals who use their extramusical skills to reassert their creative acumen.

Alyxandra Vesey is Assistant Professor in Journalism and Creative Media at the University of Alabama. Her research focuses on the gendered dynamics of creative labor in the music industries. Her work has appeared in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Television and New Media, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Camera Obscura, Velvet Light Trap, and Emergent Feminisms: Complicating a Postfeminist Media Culture.

Rob Drew Explores How the Cassette Tape Evolved from Obscurity to Cultural Icon In New Book “Unspooled”

Eric Alper
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Rob Drew Explores How the Cassette Tape Evolved from Obscurity to Cultural Icon In New Book “Unspooled”

Well into the new millennium, the analog cassette tape continues to claw its way back from obsolescence. New cassette labels emerge from hipster enclaves while the cassette’s likeness pops up on T-shirts, coffee mugs, belt buckles, and cell phone cases. In Unspooled, Rob Drew traces how a lowly, hissy format that began life in office dictation machines and cheap portable players came to be regarded as a token of intimate expression through music and a source of cultural capital. Drawing on sources ranging from obscure music zines to transcripts of Congressional hearings, Drew examines a moment in the early 1980s when music industry representatives argued that the cassette encouraged piracy. At the same time, 1980s indie rock culture used the cassette as a symbol to define itself as an outsider community. Indie’s love affair with the cassette culminated in the mixtape, which advanced indie’s image as a gift economy. By telling the cassette’s long and winding history, Drew demonstrates that sharing cassettes became an acceptable and meaningful mode of communication that initiated rituals of independent music recording, re-recording, and gifting.

Hearing Race: How ‘The Sonic Color Line’ Redefines Sound, Listening, and Racial Politics in America

Eric Alper
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0
Hearing Race: How ‘The Sonic Color Line’ Redefines Sound, Listening, and Racial Politics in America

Race is a visual phenomenon, the ability to see “difference.” At least that is what conventional wisdom has lead us to believe. Yet, the new book The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening argues that American ideologies of white supremacy are just as dependent on what we hear–voices, musical taste, volume–as they are on skin color or hair texture. Reinforcing compelling new ideas about the relationship between race and sound with meticulous historical research, Jennifer Lynn Stoever helps us to better understand how sound and listening not only register the racial politics of our world, but actively produce them. Through analysis of the historical traces of sounds of African American performers, Stoever reveals a host of racialized aural representations operating at the level of the unseen–the sonic color line–and exposes the racialized listening practices she figures as “the listening ear.”

Using an innovative multimedia archive spanning 100 years of American history (1845-1945) and several artistic genres–the slave narrative, opera, the novel, so-called “dialect stories,” folk and blues, early sound cinema, and radio drama–The Sonic Color Line explores how black thinkers conceived the cultural politics of listening at work during slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. By amplifying Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, Charles Chesnutt, The Fisk Jubilee Singers, Ann Petry, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Lena Horne as agents and theorists of sound, Stoever provides a new perspective on key canonical works in African American literary history. In the process, she radically revises the established historiography of sound studies. The Sonic Color Line sounds out how Americans have created, heard, and resisted “race,” so that we may hear our contemporary world differently.

‘The Political Legacy of the Pet Shop Boys’ Explores Four Decades of Cultural and Queer Activism

Eric Alper
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0
‘The Political Legacy of the Pet Shop Boys’ Explores Four Decades of Cultural and Queer Activism

The Pet Shop Boys came of age at a time of deep socio-political tension. From the rise of sexual politics and awareness to Thatcherite neoliberalism and the Cold War, this book explores the cultural and political impact of the band and offers a fascinating window into the late 20th and early 21st centuries. An archetypal ‘gay band’, it shows how their overt queerness influenced generations of LGBTQIA+ music lovers and artists alike.

Covering the full oeuvre of the Pet Shop Boys; their albums, films, stage productions and collaborations, chapters in The Pet Shop Boys and the Political, edited by Bodie A. Ashton show how their work is suffused with political commentary on the past and present covering themes as broad as queer identity, the HIV/AIDs epidemic, globalization and Brexit. It also places them within the context of their times and considers them as activists, authors, social commentators, political actors and personalities to better understand what influenced them. Bringing together a range of perspectives and disciplines, The Pet Shop Boys and the Political provides a unique and untapped insight into a formative pop band of the modern era that has mirrored and shaped society over the past forty years.

5 Surprising Facts About Santana’s “Abraxas”

Eric Alper
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0
5 Surprising Facts About Santana’s “Abraxas”

When Santana’s Abraxas hit the shelves on September 23, 1970, it was a groundbreaking moment that fused Latin rhythms, blues, rock, and jazz into an unforgettable masterpiece. Featuring iconic tracks like “Black Magic Woman” and “Oye Como Va,” this record not only topped the charts but also redefined genre boundaries. Here are five unknown facts about Abraxas that showcase the genius behind its creation and enduring legacy.

1. The Mystical Inspiration Behind the Title
The album’s title, Abraxas, originates from Hermann Hesse’s 1919 novel Demian. A quote from the book, printed on the album’s back cover, speaks of the spiritual and emotional duality embodied by the word. This philosophical edge set the tone for Santana’s genre-blending sound and deepened the album’s mystique.

2. The Evolution of “Black Magic Woman”
Though many associate “Black Magic Woman” with Santana, the song was originally written by Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green. Santana’s version, paired with Gábor Szabó’s instrumental “Gypsy Queen,” added Latin percussion, jazz fusion, and a voodoo-like energy that transformed it into a signature hit.

3. “Samba Pa Ti”: A Street Performance Spark
“Samba Pa Ti,” one of Santana’s most beloved instrumentals, was inspired by a jazz saxophonist performing on a street outside Carlos Santana’s apartment. That serendipitous moment birthed a track that would later be reimagined by artists like José Feliciano and Angélique Kidjo, cementing its place in global music history.

4. The Art That Transcended the Album
The iconic Abraxas cover art features Mati Klarwein’s 1961 painting Annunciation, which Carlos Santana spotted in a magazine. Klarwein’s surrealist imagery—later associated with Miles Davis and other greats—perfectly captured the album’s otherworldly vibe and has become a classic in its own right.

5. A Seamless Suite of Sound
The first three tracks on Abraxas—“Singing Winds, Crying Beasts,” “Black Magic Woman,” and “Gypsy Queen”—merge into a continuous 14-minute suite. This pioneering approach to album composition immersed listeners in a fluid musical journey, breaking the mold of standalone tracks.

From mystical inspirations to transcendent artistry, Abraxas continues to enchant listeners more than 50 years after its release. Santana’s genre-defying brilliance not only earned the album a spot at #1 on the charts but also in the hearts of fans worldwide. If these facts surprise you, it’s time to rediscover the magic of Abraxas—an album that feels as revolutionary today as it did in 1970.

Alejandro Escovedo Talks To Broken Record About His 5-Decade Career

Eric Alper
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Alejandro Escovedo Talks To Broken Record About His 5-Decade Career

Alejandro Escovedo’s career is a masterclass in evolution, blending punk roots, Texan storytelling, and experimental rock. From his early days with San Francisco’s legendary punk band the Nuns to redefining roots rock with Rank and File and The True Believers, his music has always been a reflection of reinvention. His latest album, Echo Dancing, spans five decades, revisiting and reimagining his iconic work with influences like Brian Eno and Suicide. Whether sharing tales of his San Antonio upbringing or playing alongside the Sex Pistols at their final show, Broken Record podcast host Bruce Headlam talking to Alejandro’s journey is as compelling as his music. You can listen to it here.

The Black Eyed Peas’ Isolated Vocals For “I Gotta Feeling”

Eric Alper
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The Black Eyed Peas’ Isolated Vocals For “I Gotta Feeling”

“I Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas is a global anthem of celebration. With 14 weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, Grammy wins, and over 9 million downloads, it redefined what a pop hit could achieve. From weddings to worldwide parties, this track became the soundtrack of a generation’s best nights ever.

Sales Funnels Demystified: How to Drive More Leads and Close Deals?

Eric Alper
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0

By Mitch Rice

In order to thrive in this competitive industry, companies should look for ways to get revenue at a sustainable pace. This is what a sales funnel can give them, where it’s essentially a lead magnet for those who are looking for paying customers.

For starters, the right funnel will help you with the steps that you need to take. As a business owner, you might want to start creating reels that can help people become more interested in your products. They will often check your profile to see if there’s more to your offer. 

Encouraging them to join your live webinars can also be a strategy that you can utilize. Gain new followers by consistently posting and being present at trade shows. Set-up a website and several landing pages that will help customers navigate their way towards the check-out buttons. The point is to become visible and to create a hook that will be persuasive enough for people to view your content. 

Afterward, you need to qualify them to see if they can purchase your goods. This can be done by chatting with them, identifying their pain points, and seeing if they have a real need for your products. Below are other things that you need to know when it comes to setting these all up in a single platform.

What are Sales Funnels?

These tools will serve as a guide throughout your customers’ journey, and it’s going to be there from the time that they’ve become aware of your brand up to the point when the purchase is complete. Understanding how it works will help you sift through your audience and narrow down the prospects who are more likely to buy your products or services.

At the top, you need to focus on your brand and setting up a logo. You need to match the colors that represent your company well with your website and everything should be uniform. You need to get more views by becoming engaging. When people become more interested, they will start to follow or subscribe to your social media posts. Others are going to sign up on your email forms so they can get updates from you.  

It’s where you nurture your leads and ramp up your efforts by providing them with value. You can also address their concerns and provide them with more information about your offers. The goal is to build a solid customer relationship and make sure that you appear authoritative in your chosen niche.

Ways to Drive More Leads

Quality Content is Important

You need to inform your audience about the features of your products in an entertaining way. Reach millions of viewers through properly edited videos and create evergreen blog posts that people will remember so you can become more memorable. 

As your leads are becoming more interested, you need to be detailed by providing them with whitepapers. Find info about leads when you click here. You can also write an eBook with product descriptions or host a webinar that will allow you to explain what your company is all about. Being able to engage with your customers and providing actionable insights are going to attract a lot of people, so make sure to leverage it as much as possible.

Also, you might come across two sales funnels available: Leadpages and Clickfunnels. Clickfunnels are very powerful, with a visual editor that you can drag and drop. There’s no need for coding, and for the hosting service, you don’t need to subscribe to a third-party company in order to make your webpage live. Instead, the new domains can be registered inside your ClickFunnels account.

Get professional templates because the platform will do the heavy lifting for you. Navigate a lot of options from its library and you can also do some split tests. There are also autoresponders for emails where you can automate the sequences if you want.

On the other hand, Leadpages’ features might be too restrictive, where there are only certain places where you can drop your widgets. There is also a set-up where you can get one site for the standard plan and up to 50 sites for the advanced packages. You can read more about Clickfunnels compared to Leadpages in the link provided to see more of the features between the two. This way, you can decide which one is ideal for you.

Use Social Media Effectively

Facebook, Threads, X, YouTube, and Instagram are all powerful tools that can help you get discovered. A lot of people are now interacting with conversations that they feel are relevant, and when they’re interested, they can directly message you to know more. These platforms are going to help you get a steady stream of prospects in the process.

Maximizing your efforts will mean that you don’t just rely on organic posting and hope someone else will stumble across your page. Instead, you might need to invest in paid ads to make sure that you’re reaching the right demographics. Using a mix of the two will help you save money and earn revenue. These platforms are going to allow you to showcase the personality of your brand and forge strong connections with your audience, especially if you can reply to their comments.

Optimize Your Website for Lead Generation

Set-up a good point of contact for your customers since it’s an essential component of the funnel. You need to make sure that the website is functional for both desktop and mobile. It should also be visually-appealing with calls-to-action buttons that can help customers take the right action. Be clear when you want them to sign up for newsletters and enable them to request for consultations when needed.

You also need to incorporate forms that can capture the email addresses of your customers. Make only one-liners that won’t confuse them, and make sure that they understand that by signing up on their sites, you’re giving them a free and valuable resource. This is in exchange for their details so you can get more leads. Analyze the performance of your site and create and make adjustments whenever possible.

Data and information are provided for informational purposes only, and are not intended for investment or other purposes.

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That Eric Alper

Eric Alper is a 6-time nominee for Publicist of the Year during Canadian Music Week and has overseen the publicity campaigns for over 183 JUNO Award-nominated albums (and 16 in 2025), 45 Grammy-nominated albums, including 47 JUNO Award, 58 Canadian Folk Music Award, 126 Maple Blues Award-winning albums and is also truly honoured to work with some of the biggest and most important artists of our time.

Contact me: eric@thatericalper.com

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