ATOM HEART MOTHER ~ Pink Floyd (Farewell, Shahrizat!)

Atom Heart Mother is the fifth studio album by English progressive rock band Pink Floyd, released in 1970 by Harvest and EMI Records in the United Kingdom and Harvest and Capitol in the United States. It was recorded at Abbey Road Studios, London, England, and reached number one in the United Kingdom, and number 55 in the United States charts, and went gold in the U.S. in March 1994. A re-mastered CD was released in 1994 in the UK, and in 1995 in the US.

This was the first Pink Floyd album to be specially mixed for 4-channel quadraphonic sound as well as conventional 2-channel stereo. The SQ quadraphonic mix was released on LP in a matrix format compatible with standard stereo record players. There was also a release of the quadraphonic version in the UK in fully discrete 4-channel form on the "Quad-8" format, a 4-channel variant of the stereo 8-track tape cartridge.

The original album cover, designed by art collective Hipgnosis, shows a cow standing in a pasture with no text nor any other clue as to what might be on the record. Some later editions have the title and artist name added to the cover. This concept was the group's reaction to the psychedelic space rock imagery associated with Pink Floyd at the time of the album's release; the band wanted to explore all sorts of music without being limited to a particular image or style of performance. They thus requested that their new album had "something plain" on the cover, which ended up being the image of the cow.

Storm Thorgerson, inspired by Andy Warhol's famous "cow-wallpaper," has said that he simply drove out into a rural area near Potters Bar and photographed the first cow he saw. The cow's owner identified her name as "Lulubelle III."

[Source: Wikipedia]