Soft Machine

This follow-up to Soft Machine's highly acclaimed 2018 album Hidden Details finds John Etheridge, Roy Babbington, John Marshall and Theo Travis on fine form at the Baked Potato, LA, USA on 1st February 2019. The material mixes tunes from Hidden Details, along with older material and some choice improvisations. The band, with a world tour under their belt and a partisan crowd urging them on, are absolutely at the top of their game - powerful, committed and idiosyncratic.

This album was the band's first for EMI's Harvest label and featured a line-up of Mike Ratledge (keyboards), Karl Jenkins (Oboe, Piano, Soprano Sax), John Marshall (Drums), Roy Babbington (Bass) and new member Allan Holdsworth (Guitar). An accessible collection, Bundles featured Holdsworth’s considerable guitar playing talents and opened a new chapter for the band, and attracted much praise upon release.

As the Soft Machine moved further away from rock on Third and Fourth, drummer/vocalist Robert Wyatt's dissatisfaction with the band's direction grew and, by the time sessions started for Fifth in late 1971, he had left permanently to form Matching Mole. While the instrumental Fourth had forayed deep into jazz-rock territory, Fifth found the Soft Machine working almost completely in the jazz idiom. At the time of Wyatt's departure, keyboardist Mike Ratledge commented that the band's co-founder had "never enjoyed or accepted working in complex time signatures." However, Wyatt's replacement - Phil Howard - didn't prove to be the kind of timekeeper Ratledge and bassist Hugh Hopper had in mind and his free jazz orientation led to his dismissal during the recording of the album…

Soft Machine's collective skill is hyper-complex and refined, as they are extremely literate in all fields of musical study. Fourth is the band's free purging of all of that knowledge, woven into noisy, smoky structures of sound. Their arcane rhythms have a stop-and-go mentality of their own that sounds incredibly fresh even though it is sonically steeped in soft and warm tones. Obviously there is a lot of skillful playing going on, as the mix of free jazz, straight-ahead jazz, and Gong-like psychedelia coalesces into a skronky plateau. Robert Wyatt's drumming is impeccable - so perfect that it at times becomes an unnoticeable map upon which the bandmembers take their instinctive direction. Mike Ratledge's keys are warm throughout, maintaining an earthy quality that keeps its eye on the space between the ground and the heavens that Soft Machine attempt to inhabit…

There is no shortage of collections of archive material by the Soft Machine and some of them are pretty good (especially the ones released on Cuneiform). But this Hux double-CD compilation is the mother lode. You just can't beat BBC recordings for good sound quality and meaningful "alternate versions." This first volume covers the group's early years up to the departure of drummer Robert Wyatt, starting with a session from December 1967, when the Softs consisted of Kevin Ayers, Mike Ratledge, and Wyatt. Early demo and live versions of dubious quality of "Clarence in Wonderland," "Certain Kind," or "Hope for Happiness" are in circulation (see Turns On, Vol. 1, for instance), but these recordings are far more superior…

A powerful rock-edged collaboration from Elton Dean, John Etheridge, Hugh Hopper and John Marshall, four legendary members of jazz-rock pioneers Soft Machine. This album itself is a mixed bag. There are two tracks that sound a bit too much like studio improvisations. There are a couple in conventional head-solo-tail jazz constructions. There is a Softs medley, Mike Ratledge's "Facelift," "As If" & "Slightly All The Time" (titled "Ratlift"). There is a ten-minute Hopper epic with typically Hopperean twists and turns.

Esoteric Recordings are pleased to announce the long overdue release of an expanded 2CD remastered edition of the classic 1978 live album Alive & Well Recorded In Paris by the celebrated Jazz and Rock group Soft Machine. The album was the band ‘s third for EMI's Harvest label and featured a line-up of KARL Jenkins (Piano, Electric Keyboards, Synthesiser), John Marshall (Drums), John Etheridge (Acoustic and Electric Guitars) and new members Steve Cook (Bass Guitar) and Ric Sanders (Violin). The final live recordings to be released by the band during their lifetime, Alive & Well was the product of several nights of excellent concerts at Le Palace Theatre in Monmartre, Paris in July 1978. The album was initially released as a single album, although the discovery of multi-track masters of a concert in the archives has resulted in this expanded edition with a CD of additional material recorded in July 1978…

This album features rare live in studio recordings for the BBC being aired on the famous "John Peel Show". They cover Soft Machine career from their album "Fifth" to "Bundles" through "Six" and "Seven", meaning a lot of personel changes and numerous musical direction shifts in between. This album gives us the opportunity to check some live performances from short lived Soft line-ups and discover some well known tracks in a different version.

The first Soft Machine LP usually got the attention, with its movable parts sleeve, as well as the presence of ultra-talented songwriter Kevin Ayers. But musically, Volume Two better conveys the Dada-ist whimsy and powerful avant rock leanings of the band. Hugh Hopper took over for Ayers on bass, and his fuzz tones and experimental leanings supplanted Ayers' pop emphasis. The creative nucleus behind this most progressive of progressive rock albums, however, is Robert Wyatt. He provides the musical arrangements to Hopper's quirky ideas on the stream-of-consciousness collection of tunes ("Rivmic Melodies") on side one. Unlike the first record, which sounded choppy and often somnolent, this one blends together better, and it has a livelier sound…