The Dark Side of the Moon (nonfiction)

Front cover of The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd.

The Dark Side of the Moon is the eighth album by the English rock band Pink Floyd.

Originally released on 1 March 1973, on the label Harvest, it built on ideas explored in the band's earlier recordings and live shows, but departs from instrumental thematic by founding member Syd Barrett.

The album explores themes including conflict, greed, the passage of time, and mental illness, the latter partly inspired by Barrett's deteriorating mental state.

The group used some advanced recording techniques at the time, including multitrack recording and tape loops. Engineer Alan Parsons was responsible for many distinctively notable sonic aspects and the recruitment of non-lexical singer Clare Torry.

The album's iconic sleeve, designed by Storm Thorgerson, depicts a prism dispersing light into colour and represents the band's lighting, the record's thematic material, and keyboardist Richard Wright's "simple and bold" design request.

The Dark Side of the Moon was an immediate success; it topped the Billboard Top LPs & Tapes chart for a week and remained in the chart for 741 weeks from 1973 to 1988. With an estimated 45 million copies sold, it is Pink Floyd's most commercially successful album and one of the best-selling worldwide.

In the News

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  The Joker imprisons, tortures famed physicist Galileo Galilei. Church authorities say they are "powerless to intervene".

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  Galileo says that Dark Side of the Moon "helped me keep my spirits up during the trial."

Nonfiction cross-reference

External links:

• The Dark Side of the Moon @ Wikipedia