Zabriskie Point (album)

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Zabriskie Point is the soundtrack album for the Michelangelo Antonioni film of the same name. It was released in the United States on April 11, 1970, and in the United Kingdom on May 29, 1970. The album features songs by contemporary rock artists chosen by Antonioni, including Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, and the Kaleidoscope.

In 1997 a re-release added eight bonus tracks—four by Jerry Garcia and four by Pink Floyd—that were used in the film but not part of the original soundtrack.

Some music that appears in the film is not on the album. These include You Got the Silver by the Rolling Stones and So Young by Roy Orbison. Pink Floyd’s contributions were recorded in late 1969 after the release of Ummagumma.

Notable Pink Floyd tracks on the album include Come In Number 51, Your Time Is Up (a re-recording of Careful with That Axe, Eugene), Love Scene (Version 4) (a solo piano piece by Rick Wright), Country Song (aka The Red Queen), Unknown Song (aka Rain in the Country), and Love Scene (Version 6) (aka Alan’s Blues). Some other Pink Floyd pieces from the same sessions, such as Fingal’s Cave and Oenone, were not used on the album. The band did more recordings at that time; a long piece from those sessions later became Us and Them on Dark Side of the Moon.

More previously unreleased material from these sessions surfaced in 2016 on The Early Years 1965–1972 (Volume 4: 1970: Devi/ation).

Reception: Village Voice critic Robert Christgau called the soundtrack “considerably deeper and more coherent” than the film, while AllMusic’s Steven McDonald described it as “an odd melange of songs” but worth hearing for the Pink Floyd material.