IoF© Spatial Additions® Dept. - Special Spatial Floyd!

Every couple of years, I screw around with Meddle, probably the "best" Floyd album. Why can't I leave it alone? Because football chants and novelty dog-singing-the blues, that's because. These aberrations are only tolerated through familiarity. The football chants were aded to the mix late in the day, as an in-joke acknowledgement to John Peel, a famous Liverpool fan. Well, okay, lol and all that, but I'd rather have the Gilmour guitar I embedded instead, at great personal expense. Seamus is a b-side. Not a major album track. It's filler. It breaks the mood. So fuck it. In its place you'll find Embryo, which fits so seamlessly [Seamusly? - Ed.], both musically and lyrically, your jaw will literally hit the floor and your dentures bounce across the linoleum like horrible old dice. I did a bunch of other stuff, too. Nuance out th' ass, and it plays as a continuous fifty-minute piece of music, because what weirdo chooses individual tracks to play from Meddle? You do, probably.

You will need headphones and an hour to yourself, and you will emerge strangely refreshed, full of heady optimism for the fate of humankind. I retitled it Echoes, because Meddle was always a shit title, and the 23 refers to this year, duh.

A word of comfort - owning and playing this swell Spatial Addition® will not delete the original album tracks from your collection. You can still listen to the dog and the football crowd if that strings your yo-yo. I don't care. 

Note how exquisite cover design [above - Ed.] "echoes" original, and suggests Crystal Voyager, surf movie that used Echoes as soundtrack. The whole deal frankly makes the original look and sound pretty damn shabby, as I'm confident you'll agree.

Burning Bridges is my edit of Obscured By Clouds. Again, it's a quantum improvement, and if you wipe that sneer off your pan I'll tell you fer why. The original album was a side project, with the band keen to move on to the nascent Dark Side Of The Moon. The sequencing is disjointed, clunky, like they grabbed the tapes at random off the studio floor. There's a ballsachingly long stretch of indigenous singing at the end to fill up the grooves. It's still a good album - I'll take it over any of their later work - but as the last album by the dear old, spacey, trippy Floyd it falls a little flat. Hence my sprinkling some fucking fairy dust over it [© Reg Presley - Ed.]. It's completely re-sequenced, to stunning effect. It's cohesive, dynamically balanced, and you'll be slapping your forehead in dumbstruck amazement at the transformation. Unfortunately, a glitch in the compression process means that installing this loaddown will delete the original tracks across your devices, both on the album and compilations. I say unfortunately, but really you'll be better off. Trust me.

Note how cover uses movie image from La Vallée [Fr. "The Valley" - Ed.] but you can actually see what it is. A broad in a tree! She's saying, "Please help me! Cannibals ate my pants!" Who could resist?

Pastoral is what it says on the tin. An album of primo Pink pastorality, harvested [oh, very good - Ed.] from the years when they could still make unapologetically gentle and beautiful music. You'll dig it, because it will remind you of happier, more innocent times, when you were young and sappy and stuck little stars on your bedroom ceiling, ya dope.

Note how haunting image [above - Ed.] out-hips Hipgnosis, asks age-old question, what th' actual fuck?

Last up (but by no means least up, as they like to say) is a recent loadup that you probably ignored, because that's the kind of bum you are. Saucerful Of Secrets is always dismissed as transitional by internet reviewers who think we give a shit what they think. All good albums are transitional, building on what went before and preparing the way for the next. I'd call it compromised. Watered down - SWIDT? It was sunny ol' Rog who replaced two perfectly good Ah Syd songs with his own manic depressive Corporal Clegg, one of the worst ever recordings by a major act, a mean, bitter, ugly rant that prefigured a personal interior journey that he forced everyone to follow. Syd's songs are edgier than anything on Piper, but they sound just fine here, balancing Rick Wright's shimmering summery pop and the cosmic spaciness of Saucerful. This is nothing more than a reshuffle, with no special edits, but it is quietly transformational, and you'll want to build a shrine to me in your dwelling-place, bedecked with showy blooms and costly votive offerings in gratitude for restoring this album to its rightful place as first-tier Floyd. Go ahead.

In a private email, Steven Wilson writes thusly: "You are something of a hero to me, Farq. I play these albums endlessly, marvelling at the qualitative improvements you achieve with no professional studio equipment and pirated mp3 files. My work fades into insignificance in comparison - I get paid many hundreds of pounds for nudging the faders to make classic iconic albums sound perceptibly worse, but your work is transformational!"