Legendary rock group Pink Floyd is on track for their first Nº1 album in nearly 20 years! One of the tracks Louder than Words, the only song on the album that has any lyrics, has a powerful music video filmed in Chernobyl, Ukraine. The song is seen by many as a tribute to the friendship among the members of Pink Floyd. “It’s certainly a strong suggestion that that could be, that it is about the band, but it could also be seen as a couple and their relationship,” band member Nick Mason said.
The video has a strong environmental message as well, filmed around what was once the Aral Sea. In days gone by the Aral Sea was the fourth-largest inland body of water in the world. The diversion of water during Soviet times from Central Asia’s two great rivers — the Syr-Darya and Amu-Darya – into the cotton fields of the region have shrunk the lake to some 10 percent of its original size in less than 100 years. Fishing boats that were once active now lay rusting in the desert many kilometers from where the shores of the lake are now.
Aubrey Powell, the creative director for Pink Floyd (working with the band since 1967) said that it was the surreal quality of the ships that appealed to him visually. Powell said the video is “not so much about the disaster – that’s been written about endlessly – but more about a generational thing, more about what it means to the younger generation, the children of the impoverished and disenfranchised communities around the Aral Sea that have lost fishing and culture.”
The end of the video is dominated by children playing in lost ships in a completely desolate landscape. Powell said, “that’s in part what the film is about and it’s about the fact of their loss and their only knowledge of the sea, and the beauty of that sea, and what it represented to their community, is through their grandparents or their parents, but they [the children] will never know.”
