Pink Floyd – Copenhagen 1970 New Tape Transfer (Sigma 150)

Copenhagen 1970 New Tape Transfer (Sigma 150)

Falkoner Centret, Copemhagen, Denmark – November 12, 1970

Disc 1 (56:26) Astronomy Domine, Fat Old Sun, Cymbaline, Atom Heart Mother

Disc 2 (58:29) Green Is The Colour, Careful With That Axe Eugene, Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun, A Saucerful Of Secrets, The Embryo

November 1970 would find The Pink Floyd playing yet another European tour, their fan base had grown dramatically in these countries, the audiences made up of people who would come to the shows to intently listen and allow the band the freedom to expand on the songs musical themes. This hardcore base would also actively record the band and recordings exist for many of the concerts on the month long tour. The concert from Copenhagen is one that has been released a few times before, early on as Copenhagen Sequence (Highland HL291/292) featuring an incomplete version of the concert. Later both Copenhagen 1970 Complete (Ayanami-226) and Blindness (Sigma 5) would feature the complete concert using two different tape sources. This concert is an easy favorite due to an excellent performance, the first recording that makes up the majority of the concert is excellent yet suffered from wow and flutter issues with Atom Heart Mother having worse issues. These issues have been addressed in this version.

First off the sound quality, this new version is louder, and has much fuller frequencies (bass is really nice) making for a warmer sound yet has more tape hiss than Blindness making for a much nicer listening experience. The hiss is more noticeable between songs and not really noticeable during the music, for my taste the difference in sound quality more than makes up for a bit of hiss. One of the main issues with the other editions of this tape were the tape issues about 2 minutes in Atom Heart Mother. This new version features an improvement on this, while it is very difficult to fix these issues, this new release addresses them nicely. While you can still here some unevenness it has been greatly smoothed out and is now barely noticeable, a very significant improvement over previous releases. They also address some volume fluctuations, the one that really stood out to me was in Green Is The Colour, they raised the volume to make the sound equal to other parts but in doing so raised the hiss level making for a bit of unevenness. As with Blindness they use the second recording to complete the concert from, while the quality of the recording is average at best, it is also a bit clearer yet I have always wondered why they did not patch the tape flip in Atom Heart Mother with this source. Please refer to GS original review of Blindness for a play by play but needless to say this is a concert every Floyd fan should have, the second set is just an incredible piece of mind melting improvised space rock at its best.

The packaging is typical Sigma, colored inserts with mainly live shots, although the posed shot on the interior tray is very nice as well. You get picture CD’s and a numbered sticker as usual. My only real beef with the art work is the song titles on the back can barely be made out, a bit lighter tone would have been nicer.