Brainstorms: A Great Gig in the Sky takes the music of Pink Floyd up into the clouds

These are the first images from Brainstorms: A Great Gig in the Sky, a new interactive experience at the central London immersive art venue Frameless. Created as part of the ongoing 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, a venture that has seen reissues aplenty and even celebratory turntable designs, the installation has been curated by Gala Wright, daughter of Pink Floyd’s co-founder keyboardist Richard Wright.

Since Wright’s death in 2008, and with it the effective end of Pink Floyd as a touring, recording band, Gala has kept closely involved in how the Floyd legacy is preserved and presented. In the modern era, the extensive and complex artistic IP of major bands can be re-interpreted in numerous ways. The lucrative likes of ABBA’s Voyage experience is one direction, but visualisations and venues are fast evolving.

Pink Floyd is perhaps more contentious than most, with surviving members effectively taking very different and often conflicting paths. Roger Waters marked the anniversary by controversially re-recording the album in its entirety, The Dark Side of the Moon Redux, a stark contrast to David Gilmour’s more aloof and distant remi-retirement, and Nick Mason’s return to smaller gigs with his Saucerful of Secrets band, a joyful celebration of Pink Floyd's early, more psychedelic material. 

‘This project arose out of my desire to engage with the album’s 50th anniversary,’ Gala Wright tells Wallpaper*, ‘I presented ideas to the band back in 2021 but it was too early to really to focus.’ A subsequent meeting with Richard Warp, CTO at the California-based Pollen Audio Group, was the point at which ideas started coming together. Warp, who is the installation's Artistic and Technical Director, works closely with tech companies to explore ways of making modern audio system more immersive.

The seeds of the Brainstorms project were sowed at Dolby’s London headquarters last Autumn. Using a Dolby Atmos speaker system, the Pollen team scanned the brain activity of over 100 participants as they listened to the track “The Great Gig in the Sky,” Richard Wright’s celebrated instrumental composition from TDSOTM, co-created with vocalist Clare Torry. 

The resulting ESG data offered up myriad possibilities for visualisation and presentation, a way of celebrating the music and the positive impact it has on our mental state. 'Brainstorms: A Great Gig in the Sky seeks to celebrate this [impact] while shining a light on the hugely complex physiological processes in our brains as we listen to music,’ Warp explains. 

Gala Wright explored various ways of presenting the data, with new venues like the Lightroom and the Outernet offering up a richly immersive experience that simply didn’t exist just a few years ago. Frameless seemed to be the perfect venue. 

‘We needed to make the data immediately understandable,’ Wright says, ‘when we did the initial work with Dolby we used cloud imagery for the visuals – my father was obsessed with clouds – and it seemed a perfect canvas to work with.’ Stressing that any visual representation of the data had to be ‘simple to be impactful,’ Warp’s team set about creating a system that could render and process the data into the striking animations you see here.

The installation is divided between Frameless’s four galleries, only one of which is given over to these evolving and billowing clouds. There’s also an interactive component. VIP ticket holders can also have their own responses recorded and then replayed. 

Another gallery houses a digitally recreated Aurora Borealis, soundtracked by the entire album on a loop, while a third is a collaboration with the musician Imogen Heap. Heap’s ambient work, ‘Cumulus’, has been given the same EEG (Electroencephalography)  analysis, only this time using the brainwaves of the innovative artist and her daughter. These are then represented by digitally powered starling murmuration, a dense and dazzling visualisation.

With bands like U2 committing huge amounts of talent and resources to new venues like the Las Vegas Sphere, it’s tempting to wonder how Pink Floyd would have responded to such infinite possibilities back in their psychedelic heyday. ‘Without question they would have gone for this technology,’ Wright says, ‘there are clear links – they were very experimental [for their time].’

Warp cites the increasing interest in the generative work of artists like Refik Anadol as indicative of the appetite for engaging ways of bringing visuals to music. By bringing truly personal and individual data to bear on the visualisations, Warp and Wright are creating another layer of emotional engagement with the music. ‘Even within the team there’s been an incredible sense of connection with everyone’s own cloud,’ says Wright. 

‘We’re pushing the boundaries of what the tech can do,’ Warp adds. ‘The visual representation of brain data provides an accessible and intuitive way to see how a piece of music can be a deeply personal yet also powerfully shared experience,’ Gala Wright concludes, ‘The added benefit of bringing awareness to my father’s compositions and musicality through the Brainstorms project serves to augment his legacy.’

Brainstorms: A Great Gig in the Sky, £30, Frameless London, Frameless.com, @framelessLDN, Brainstorms.uk, Pollen Audio Group, PollenAudioGroup.com