Pink Floyd turns attention to Aral Sea catastrophe in new music video

The cult British band Pink Floyd will include footage of the Aral Sea in its new music video for the song "Louder than Words", a closing track of the new album of the band The Endless River, Tengrinews reports.

The filming was conducted by a British production company Hipgnosis, which has worked with Pink Floyd for more than 40 years. A team of four people led by director Aubrey Powell have already finished filming the necessary material. They were assisted by Kochegary Studio in Kazakhstan.

Powell said that the message of the video is that human actions speak louder than words. "It is more important what you do than what you say. The message of the video concerns the Aral Sea. We touched on environmental issues. We shot wonderful, beautiful shots of the sea, ships at a pier. In the video we want to say: "Let's bring back the sea”. That is we hope that it will come back," Powell says.

The Aral Sea used to be the fourth largest lake in the world until a devastating Soviet experiment led to its drying out. In the 1960s the Soviet Union decided to divert waters from the two big rivers of Central Asia - Amu Darya and Syr Darya - to irrigate fields in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

The desert started blooming but the lake was slowly dying. Latest NASA images show that the bigger part of the Aral Sea has disappeared for the first time in 600 years.

The music video director noted that he was familiar with the problems of the Aral Sea. When he suggested using this theme to the members of Pink Floyd, they supported it.

"When we talked with David Gilmour, we decided that the video had to draw attention to these issues, but not only from a negative perspective. We wanted to show that maybe we can help bring back the sea. When bad things happen in our lives, one can find something good in them too. It is not necessary to see everything in a bad light. The message of the video is primarily positive. (...) Like all Pink Floyd songs, this composition is also filled with deep meaning and philosophy," he said.

The video will deal with two generations – the young and the old. The ones who have never seen the Aral Sea and the ones who told stories about the Aral Sea to their grandchildren.

The main characters in the video were played by locals. As for the band members, they will also appear in some frames, which however, were filmed in Britain.

The musicians visited Kazakhstan back in 1998 and had a chance to see the Aral Sea.

The world famous Pink Floyd was founded in 1965 by fellow students Richard Wright (keyboards, vocals), Roger Waters (bass guitar, vocals), Nick Mason (drums) and Syd Barrett (vocals, guitar). Later the quartet was joined by David Gilmour (guitar, vocals) in 1967, while Barrett left in 1968.

Pink Floyd is famous for philosophical lyrics and innovative sounds. Their music is described as progressive and psychedelic. They remain one of the most commercially successful and musically influential groups in the history of rock and popular music.

The previous album of the group was produced back in 1994, which is also when the group unofficially disbanded. Pink Floyd reunited in 2005 for a performance at the global awareness event Live 8.

“Louder than Words” is a song included into the last official album of the group - The Endless River - that will be released on November 10. The album is a tribute to Richard Wright, who passed away in 2008. The album includes recording sessions of 1993-1994, the time when Pink Floyd was working on The Division Bell. 

Reporting by Aizhan Tugelbayeva, writing by Dinara Urazova