The Soft Machine, as reissue also titled "Volume One", is the debut album by the British psychedelic rock band Soft Machine, one of the central bands in the Canterbury scene. The band, founded in 1966, recorded and released this studio album during their 1968 tour of the USA. It was produced by Chas Chandler and Tom Wilson.
The title of Pink Floyd's debut album is taken from a chapter in Syd Barrett's favorite children's book, The Wind in the Willows, and the lyrical imagery of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is indeed full of colorful, childlike, distinctly British whimsy, albeit filtered through the perceptive lens of LSD. Barrett's catchy, melodic acid pop songs are balanced with longer, more experimental pieces showcasing the group's instrumental freak-outs, often using themes of space travel as metaphors for hallucinogenic experiences – "Astronomy Domine" is a poppier number in this vein, but tracks like "Interstellar Overdrive" are some of the earliest forays into what has been tagged space rock…
The title of Pink Floyd's debut album is taken from a chapter in Syd Barrett's favorite children's book, The Wind in the Willows, and the lyrical imagery of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is indeed full of colorful, childlike, distinctly British whimsy, albeit filtered through the perceptive lens of LSD…
EMI Records managed to miss marking the 40th anniversary of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's album, but they just about made up for it with this triple-CD set, packaged in a handsome hardcover book format. It offers fans of the early Pink Floyd a chance to do something for the first time in the CD era (and for the first time since the year 1967) - immerse themselves, up to the neck at least (if not quite to the top of the head) in the Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd sound. EMI pulled out all the stops with this triple-disc set commemorating the 40th anniversary of the release of Pink Floyd's debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, containing the stereo and mono mixes of the album on two separate digital platters, and augmenting them with a bonus CD containing the band's three early singles, plus two previously unreleased alternate takes (an "alternative version" of "Matilda Mother" and "Take 6" of "Interstellar Overdrive")…