Description
Label Review.
1971 album.
Our Overview.
Soft Machine were for many, the standard against which all jazz-rock fusion, including many of the big American names, had to be measured. They were one of the more influential bands of their era, and certainly one of the most influential underground ones.
One of the original British psychedelic groups, they were also instrumental in the birth of both progressive rock and jazz-rock. They were also the central foundation of the family tree of the "Canterbury Scene" of British progressive rock acts, a movement that also included Caravan, Gong, Matching Mole, Hatfield and the North, and National Health, not to mention the distinguished pop music careers of founding members Robert Wyatt and Kevin Ayers and the jazz and jazz-rock explorations of saxophonist Elton Dean and bassist Hugh Hopper.
Their music reaching from psychedelic, alternative pop songs in the sixties to highly complex fusion in the seventies and in the beginning were as famous as Pink Floyd. Their music, combined with a spectacular lightshow, was unknown for that time. With Pink Floyd they shared the honour of being an example on how to bring a huge multimedia spectacle on stage.
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.