Drew Mulholland, a lecturer and composer-in-residence at Glasgow University, has turned a handful of debris collected from the garden of Pink Floyd co-founder Syd Barrett into a 8-minute audio recording.
Mulholland, who boasts of being labelled a “groovy academic” and “weirdy,” started producing avant-garde recordings as a teenager in the 1970s. In the ’90s, the Ghost Box label released an album of this work titled “The Séance at Hobs Lane” under his moniker the Mount Vernon Arts Lab.
His Barrett-inspired piece, “Mandy Rakes Up the Leaves Again,” was created with a collection of leaves, moss and twigs Mullholland found alongside the garden of Barrett’s former home in Cambridge. After arranging and gluing it to a 7-inch cardboard disc (pictured) and playing it through a record-player, he cut up the output and reassembled it into a collage of ghostly pops and snaps lasted just under eight minutes.
Barrett left Pink Floyd shortly after the band’s star began to rise in the ’60s, and famously retreated to his family home in Cambridge where we lived out the rest of his life.
