Record Realm

06/01/2026

05/30/2026

Wow! That's so cool! And after reading the description: Could we please please hear the original audio without editing and re-recording? I would be very curious how the original sounded. Maybe also to show, that robots won't replace humanity any time soon... Thanks for the wonderful video Carolina!

An art-meets-technology installation featuring a human and robot duet on two theremins, attempting the Flower Duet from Lakmé by Léo Delibes.In 2023, I met A...

05/30/2026

True Stories
Pink Floyd was recording a song about Syd Barrett when a bald, overweight stranger quietly walked into Abbey Road Studios and started brushing his teeth.

At first, nobody recognized him.

Not David Gilmour.
Not Nick Mason.
Not even Roger Waters.

The man stood silently near the control room while the band worked on “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” a song written about the friend they believed they had already lost psychologically years earlier.

Then someone finally realized who was standing there.

Roger Waters reportedly broke down crying.

Because the silent stranger watching them record was Syd Barrett himself.

And he barely looked human to them anymore.

The shock inside the room came from one brutal fact:

Just a few years earlier, Barrett had been the center of everything. The face of London’s psychedelic explosion. The strange genius who invented Pink Floyd’s sound while other bands still sounded trapped in ordinary rock music. In underground clubs during the mid-1960s, audiences watched him create hypnotic guitar noise while writing surreal songs that sounded playful and deeply disturbing at the same time.

He was magnetic.

Funny.
Beautiful.
Unpredictable.

People around the London music scene talked about Barrett like he had direct access to somewhere other musicians could not reach.

Then fame arrived at the exact same time as heavy L*D abuse.

At first, the changes looked small. Barrett became quieter during conversations. Distracted during rehearsals. Sometimes he stared blankly into space while people spoke directly to him.

Then things became frightening.

During live shows, he occasionally played one chord repeatedly through entire songs. Other nights he stood almost motionless while the rest of Pink Floyd struggled around him publicly. Interviews became painful to watch. Television appearances turned awkward and surreal because nobody knew whether Barrett would participate or mentally disappear in real time.

One performance became infamous inside the band.

Before going onstage, Barrett reportedly crushed Mandrax sedatives into his hair and mixed them with Brylcreem. Under the heat of the stage lights, the chemical mixture slowly melted down his forehead and face while he stared into the audience almost catatonically.

People in the crowd thought it was psychedelic theater.

It wasn’t.

Friends later admitted they were watching someone collapse psychologically in front of them while the music industry kept demanding more performances, more tours, more interviews, more drugs, more chaos.

Then came the car ride that effectively ended Syd Barrett’s career.

The band was driving to a concert when someone asked:
“Should we pick Syd up?”

Another voice answered:
“Let’s not bother.”

That was it.

No meeting.
No formal firing.
No goodbye.

Pink Floyd simply stopped collecting the man who created Pink Floyd.

David Gilmour replaced him shortly afterward, while Barrett drifted further away from reality. Friends visiting him described long silences, erratic behavior, emotional withdrawal, and frightening psychological instability. Some blamed L*D permanently damaging his mind. Others suspected schizophrenia or severe mental illness that exploded under pressure and drug abuse.

Maybe nobody really knew.

What made the tragedy unbearable for the remaining members was that Barrett never stopped haunting the band afterward.

“The Dark Side of the Moon.”
“Wish You Were Here.”
“Shine On You Crazy Diamond.”

The biggest albums of Pink Floyd’s career were filled with absence, guilt, madness, and emotional isolation because Syd Barrett’s collapse became the emotional wound underneath nearly everything they created afterward.

Then came the moment inside Abbey Road Studios in 1975.

The band had spent hours recording lyrics directly about Barrett:
“Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun.”

And while they were singing about him like a dead man, he quietly walked into the room alive.

Except he barely resembled the person they remembered.

His eyebrows were gone.
His head was shaved.
His body was swollen from years of isolation and medication.
He spoke strangely.
Sometimes not at all.

The band members were horrified by how complete the transformation looked.

As if the friend they loved had disappeared while his body remained behind.

After that, Barrett retreated almost entirely from public life. He returned to Cambridge, avoided interviews, stopped performing, and spent years living quietly with family while one of the biggest bands in history continued carrying his ghost across stadiums worldwide.

Fans spent decades romanticizing him:
The lost genius.
The psychedelic casualty.
The artist destroyed by fame.

But maybe the most disturbing part of Syd Barrett’s story is simpler than all the mythology.

Pink Floyd became one of the biggest bands on Earth...

by spending the rest of their career trying to process the moment they watched their best friend disappear in front of them.

05/30/2026

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/may/29/paul-mccartney-bandmates-oasis-nostalgic-new-album-the-boys-of-dungeon-lane?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

At 83, McCartney is looking back for his 18th solo LP, to formative flirtations, family singalongs, even his own birth – and the febrile times that mirror our own. It’s given him ‘every hope that we’ll get through’

05/29/2026

BREAKING: LOL! Trump’s “Great American State Fair” on the National Mall collapses in total humiliation as the major stars ALL bail!
As Kris Kristofferson might have put it, “Freedom 250” is just another word for a festival with few acts left to lose. Tee hee!
As of Friday morning, six out of the nine artists announced just days earlier for the Trump-affiliated “Great American State Fair” have now pulled out of the event.
The latest to jump ship is aging rocker Bret Michaels of Poison, who said the atmosphere around the show had turned toxic and that he was unnerved by threats pouring in over the controversial festival.
He joins headliner Martina McBride, (frankly the only artist not mining the nostalgia circuit), the Commodores, Young MC, Morris Day and The Time, and the surviving half of Milli Vanilli (Fab Morvan) in bailing on the gigs.
Naturally, MAGA world is in full meltdown, lashing out at the performers, one way saying they had all been “Dixie-chicked” with puffed up derision.
Trump ally Richard Grenell was especially triggered by the exodus, sharing a post lamenting the cancellations as “sad” and adding the hysterical complaint: “The intolerance is coming from your side. Why can’t you people be around people that disagree with you politically?”
The mass walkout has left the Trump-affiliated event in total disarray. What was supposed to be a big patriotic spectacle celebrating a MAGAfied 250th anniversary is turning into a complete embarrassment for Trump and his allies.
Even has-been artists dying for publicity to revive their flagging careers are running away from the in droves, with an impending sense of the event’s awfulness and the obvious use of their presence as a Trumpy political prop.
Yes, Trump’s big party is absolutely collapsing before it even starts because no one wants to be associated with it. Even Bret Michaels and Milli (RIP Vanilli) said “no thanks.” The embarrassment level is off the charts.
If it cheers you up on a Friday morning that these bozos can’t get this stupid event off the ground, like and share.

05/29/2026

"I worry about the health of Dr. Hunter Thompson. I think I am supposed to do that. He is the most creatively crazy and vulnerable of the New Journalists, seemingly, and scattered throughout his dispatches are alarming reports on his health. Nor are his sicknesses imaginary. In this, his latest book, he gives the opinion of a physician: "He'd never seen anybody with as bad a case of anxiety as I had. He said I was right on the verge of a complete mental, physical, and emotional collapse."

Why would he tell us this? What could this be but a cry for help? And what can we do to help him? It isn't as though he doesn't try to help himself. He isn't like George Orwell, for instance, who is said to have been fairly listless in fighting disease. Thompson, if he is to be believed, has sampled the entire rainbow of legal and illegal drugs in heroic efforts to feel better than he does.

Again: what can we do to help him? I do not know him, except from his books, which are brilliant and honorable and valuable. The evidence in those argues that reality is killing him, because it is so ugly and cheap. He imagines in [Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72] that reality, and hence his health, might be improved if nobler men held office in this country and addressed themselves truthfully to the problems of our time.

There is plenty of news in this newest Fear and Loathing book. Thompson suggests, for instance, that the person who created the poisonous statement, "I stand behind Tom Eagleton 1,000 percent," was not McGovern. It may have been Eagleton who did that, telling reporters what McGovern supposedly said. And Thompson detests Eagleton as much as he adores [football player] Duane Thomas. He calls the Senator "an opportunistic liar," "a hack," and "another one of those cheap hustlers," among other things.

Insults of that sort, isolated in a review, convey the idea of journalism at least as contemptible as the man attacked. But in the context of such a long and passionate book, such lapses seem almost beautiful. Curiously, they are so frenzied, so grotesque, that they can do no harm to Eagleton. I am extremely grateful for the New Journalism, as many responsible people are not. And what I think about it now is that it is the literary equivalent of Cubism: All rules are broken; we are shown pictures such as no mature, well-trained artist ever painted before, and in the crazy new pictures we somehow see luminous new aspects of beloved old truths….

New Journalists are Populists screaming in pain.

They believe that it is easy and natural for Americans to be brotherly and just. That illusion, if it is an illusion, is the standard for well-being in the New Journalists' minds. Any deviation from that standard is perceived as a wound or a sickness. So the present atmosphere in America seems to them to be like the famous torture described by Orwell of tying the victim's hands and enclosing his head in a cage. And then a hungry rat is put into the cage.

As for those who wish to know more about Thompson and his ideals, his frazzled nervous system, his self-destructiveness, and all that—he is unabridgeable. He is that rare sort of American author who must be read. He makes exciting, moving collages of carefully selected junk. They must be experienced. They can't be paraphrased."

~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,
excerpted from "A Political Disease"
Wampeters Foma & Granfalloons (copyright © 1974)

(originally published in Harper's, Vol. 247, No. 1478, July, 1973),