The Soft Machine｜Vinyl Monday

Added: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]Hi, I'm Abby. I have a lot of records and this is Vinyl Monday.

[00:00:21]So, welcome back or welcome if this is your first time here. Vinyl Monday is the who, what, when, where, why, and how do I feel about classic albums in my collection. If TV show length episodes aren't your thing, don't worry. I also do Vinyl Monday in 60 seconds here on my channel, over on my Instagram, as well as Tik Tok. Before we kick this week's episode off, I have two podcast episodes to announce. Two episodes I had a hand in, one of which I was not online for.

[00:00:50]Typically, my co-host Emma and I trade off who writes what script. But our episode about singer Linda Perhacks became a true collaborative effort. I'm reading the notes that she sent me and I realize, wait, I know that guy. Why don't I just call him up? My interview with Fernando Peromo, producer of Linda's second and third albums, made it into the episode. We talked about those projects a little bit about Linda's first as well. parallelograms. The following episode that went up last Friday is about a musician I've been waiting sometime to talk about, Alice Col Train. The Peanut Gallery will know I picked up Journey and Sachi Denanda a few months ago, coinciding with the release of this fabulous Alice biography. This episode was a pleasure to write. The Dolls podcast is available wherever you stream your podcasts, but as always, Apple and Spotify are linked in the description. On to this week's episode. Considering it is officially the month of my birthday, woo! For the next 3 weeks up until my actual birthday, I will be covering whatever the hell I want. We'll get some oddball stuff in the mix, some heavy psych, even some jazz. We are starting our planned trifecta with something in the middle.

[00:02:12]This week's album is The Soft Machine, aka Volume 1. Congrats if you guessed this one. Remember, if you want to play along, all you got to do is check out my post tab. That's where I post the hints to what the next album is going to be. I make announcements. I host polls. You can find all of that on my channel. And if you so choose, you can always read the written versions of my reviews on my website linked in the description. All right, with great care taken not to accidentally turn a wheel and reveal some butts, let's take the plastic off.

[00:02:54]So my copy of the soft machine is a US original. I got mine from Jerosa Records in Brookfield, Connecticut. I wrote about that place for my record store day feature over on Tracking Angle. But I actually picked this up the first time I visited Jerosa in I believe July of last year, maybe August. It was the same day I got this chair filmed this cold open and broke these boots. Now, let's talk about this cover art or the packaging rather. Illustrator Byron God devised this crazy sleeve. It's like Led Zeppelin 3 on steroids. We have the cutout front cover, the wheel with the cutouts. I can't really turn it with it on my side, but B-roll Abby will have no problem showing this to you. When you turn the wheel, it makes the cog spin.

[00:03:47]And we have an insert behind that. It's not quite as customizable as Led Zeppelin 3. Neither the wheel nor the insert are double-sided, but this is way more involved. And there's 100%, no 200%, no 300% more butts. Uncensored copies have a lot of butts. I'm not sure how much I'm going to be able to show you watching on YouTube. I have a lot more freedom with this stuff over on Patreon. As if all this grooving in motion wasn't enough, you got to peek at this earlier. This is a gatefold with liner notes by Arnold Shaw. He was a music journalist pushing 60 at the time, known for his writing about the likes of Frank Sinatra. Reading these liner notes, it is clear he was in way over his head with the soft machine. One has to wonder if the label spent so much money on packaging they couldn't foot the budget for an editor. Because this essay includes such shiners as, and I quote, "The drive is to synthesize the diverse sounds of jazz and rock in an electronic continuity." Continuity is the precise word for even in personals.

[00:05:06]The group set are like sweets, quote, shock values of unstructured composition. Although many of their works are songs and quote, "The lines of succeeding numbers frequently echo or are developments as with hope for happiness in this album of a preceding number."

[00:05:28]My brother in Christ, do you mean it's a repreeze? How this made it to the printers, I have no idea, but kudos to them for getting the cutouts well most of the way lined up. Misgivings about the liners aside, I love this packaging.

[00:05:46]The red text on absin green painted on shirt. The model with the windup crank in her back that would never fly today.

[00:05:55]On the Soft Machine's first album, we have I think this is the fourth lineup of the Soft Machine, maybe the third. It depends on when you start counting.

[00:06:06]Robert Wyatt on drums and lead vocals.

[00:06:09]Mike Rattlage on organ and Kevin Ayes on bass and lead vocals on We Did It Again and Why Are We Sleeping. Our only special guests on this album are Cake.

[00:06:21]No, not that one. They provide backing vocals on Why Are We Sleeping? The Soft Machine's debut was produced by Chaz Chandler and Tom Wilson.

[00:06:32]Roll transition.

[00:06:43]There are woefully few texts on the Canterbury scene out there and one very important one I was priced out of and even fewer texts on the soft machine which astonishes me because this ban was connected to the lore of Jimmy Hendris, Sid Barrett and Pink Floyd, The Animals, The Who. And that's just to name a few.

[00:07:05]For the uninitiated, brace yourselves.

[00:07:08]Soft machine lore is an utter [ __ ] farce. What in the ship OF THESIUS IS THIS? And I thought, yes, we're bad.

[00:07:17]Before we get too far into the weeds, what is the Canterbury scene? We think of the Canterbury tales. It's quintessentially English for one. An ideal Mike Barnes described as a quote culture meets counterculture freaks playground. England boasted a large healthy middle class in the early to mid 1960s. They'd have extensive knowledge of literature, classical and avantguard music and art. Parents had good paying jobs so kids had access to higher education. Kevin Ayes said quote no one wanted to have a proper job. The whole thing about Soft Machine was that it had all these people from middle class literary educated backgrounds suddenly going it. I'm not going to join medical school. I'm not going to become a lawyer or a doctor. I'm not going to be a professional. And this hadn't happened anywhere else in pop. These guys lyrics are filtered through a very English sense of humor and vocabulary. As far as the music goes, Canterbury is where psychedelic rock and jazz meet with the beginnings of Prague with a healthy twist of classical music. This pop sensibility that these players had was largely outside the influence of American R&B. This is in total contrast to the English white boy blues band craze that swept the nation in the middle of the decade. Another hallmark of this sound is the organ filtered through the fuzzbox, Lesley Cabinet, and Marshall Stacks. Mike Rattlage himself invented this approach as a way to be heard over the den of his bandmates.

[00:08:54]There's a Canterbury scene family tree and the wild flowers were the seed. They spawned the soft machine matching mole Hatfield and the north caravan and gong.

[00:09:05]If the wild flowers and therefore most of the Canterbury scene which sprang from them had a ground zero. It would have been Oxford grad Robert Wyatt's mom's house. It was a home filled with avantguard music, beatnick poetry, and borders to help pay the bills, including Australian David Allen. Meanwhile, after a zany runin with the law, Kevin Ayes went to live at the Wellington house at Lyen near, you guessed it, Canterbury.

[00:09:34]There he met Robert's friend, Mike Ratlage. The David Allen trio was actually a quartet with Robert, Mike, and Hugh Hopper on bass. Remember that name for later. This was the quartet that mutated into the wild flowers in 1964. These guys were into Bbop and free jazz. Mingus, Ceil Taylor, John Col Trains, modal jazz. Robert was also into Stockhousen and Bean. Then you have Kevin. He was sitting at home listening to Rogers and Hammerstein soundtracks.

[00:10:04]This breakdown is really interesting when you note that Kevin, David, and Robert are the guys in the band with little musical training. Mike was the only one. Robert said, quote, "My actual journey of discovery was that I discovered the beauty of simple popular music, and it was much more elusive really than people who put it down realize. Anybody who think pop music's easy should try to make a pop single and find out that it isn't. Given their collective musical DNA, you can imagine the Wild Flowers utter lack of success as an English R&B group. Therefore, they decided they'd play exclusively original compositions." Mike explained the new band name which came from a William S.

[00:10:46]Burrough's text as quote a generic term for all of humanity and we were all soft machines. Well, our basic assumption is that what we like everybody else is going to like as well. You know that we all have things in common and therefore we are all soft machines and we're all going to like soft machine music. It might have been a false assumption, but I hope it's true. Now the band is operating with Kevin on bass, Mike on organ, David on guitar, Larry Nolan also on guitar. Oops, he's already quit. And Robert Wyatt on drums, and a very reluctant lead vocal. He described singing and drumming at the same time as quote, "a complete up on both fronts.

[00:11:26]It's not just difficult, it's impossible." Kevin introduces the group to some honest to goodness management.

[00:11:33]Mike Jeffrey and a name you've definitely heard on this series before, Chaz Chandler. Though Kevin's motivation for doing this was mostly to get his own songs recorded. They send the band on the typical British band Route of the Time, a residency at the Star Club in Hamburg. As you'll find was typical for the Softs, this excursion went comically wrong. When the band got back from Germany, they found an underground scene just waiting for them to take. The softs become one of two twin nuclei with architects and artists turn rock band Pink Floyd. The soft machine play opposite Floyd literally at several landmark London psychedelic happenings.

[00:12:16]The pop costume mask drag ball with a happening orchestrated by Yoko Ono, the Roundhouse, the speak easy, the Middle Earth Club about the fabled 14-hour technicolor dream. McFaren said, quote, "What the hell was going on here? Was it merely a vast fashion aberration? Or were we seeing a brand new mass art movement like the paffelites or the aesthetics only quantum multiplied by the vast numbers of the baby boom?" Both the Softs and Floyd become the house bands of Joe Boyd's EUO, not UFO, EUO club. About their weekly audience, Robert said they were all stoned. And if they hated it, they were too out of it to beat you up. Really? We found out what you mustn't do is stop. Somebody will boo, so don't stop. That's how the Soft Machine wound up with their sweets.

[00:13:10]Joe liked the softs live, but after producing She's Gone and I Should Have Known, he felt they just couldn't hack it in the studio. The band name taken from a William Burrough's novel epitomized their problem. They were just trying that little bit too hard. Enter Kim Fowley. He recorded feeling reeling squeezing. He recorded reel and feeling sweet. He recorded the feeling, reeling.

[00:13:35]Through some contractual, he stole the Masters and released it himself as Shadows in the Sun by a group called Beautiful. And I never would have known about this had my best friend not stumbled on Shadows in the Sun on some random compilation, clocked it as real and feeling squeezing, and DM'd it to me on Instagram. Thank you, Jack.

[00:13:59]Meanwhile, Chaz Chandler and Mike Jeffrey are a little busy with their other group. You might have heard of them. Only the Jimmy Hendris experience.

[00:14:10]Chaz and Jeffrey got Jimmy signed to Polydor Records on the condition that A, the Soft Machine could record a single, too, and B, they'd finance Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp's new track records label, which would take the experience if Hey Joe was a hit. Convoluted, I know. Hey Joe was in fact a success.

[00:14:32]Jimmy moved to track records. The softs cut love makes sweet music which becomes a pirate radio hit. Speaking of pirate radio, the Who moved to track records as well.

[00:14:43]>> Track records. Track records. Track records.

[00:14:46]>> But it seems that all parties put the cart before the horse. For whatever reason that I couldn't quite parse out, the money from Polyor either didn't come through or it was less than everyone was expecting. Chaz had to take out a personal line of credit just so Jimmy could finish are you experienced the who slaves on tour in the US so they can finish the who sell out. You can imagine the soft machiner in kind of a tight spot. They are trying in vain just to get some freaking demos this time with another infamous eccentric Giorgio Golski once again. Giorgio steals their masters. Fool them once. Shame on Kim Fley. fool them twice. Good grief. The soft solution to their problems is to go on a hairbrain series of adventures in France, including but not limited to the disco tech. they booked their residency with closing after a few days. Writing the overture for Pablo Picasso's latest play, the mayor of Sanrope banning them from the city for playing we did it again for too long and accidentally becoming the figure heads of patics.

[00:15:59]What is paphysics, you might ask? From what I can gather, paphysics was the brainchild of 19th century French thinker Alfred Yari, being the science of imaginary problems and solutions. It concerns the indefinable contradictory anomalies that can't easily be explained. Since these are irrational concepts, then the laws of science wouldn't apply. I don't know. It sounds a whole lot like dada and surrealism to me. Seor Perk writing an entire book without the letter E, then writing another where the only vowel was E. I'm not even sure. And neither were the softs. We were playing in Paris and some representatives of the College of Pophysics came to the concert. A very venerable old member of their group, heard it for about 5 minutes, thought we played the most incomprehensible and appalling music he had ever heard, gave us his blessing and certificate. So, we are officially Pifi Ubu, Ubu's grandchildren. But no one who gave the title to us thought to explain it any more than you would explain a football match to a teddy bear mascot. Upon returning from France, the softs hear that News of the World has published an article that ramped up Scotland Yard's little crusade against rock and roll musicians on the drugs. Mind you, this article was so poorly researched that MC Jagger had serious grounds to sue for liel over these stupid stupid journalists mistaking him for Brian Jones. A photo of the soft machine playing the EUO ran in the same article.

[00:17:40]Now, David's friend John Eim was arrested for possession. One of these border agents takes one look at David, looks at the photo that is presumably in his wallet of Jon and his accompllices, and notices, "Hey, this guy's Australian. He doesn't have papers to work in the UK.

[00:17:59]We have an opportunity here." David is yeated back to France where he forms gong. Changing a band's lineup will change the chemical makeup of their music. David's musical background was very important to the soft sound. He was the one who injected jazz into the mix.

[00:18:16]Not to mention, he was theiring guitarist. Instead of finding a replacement, Robert, Mike, and Kevin continue as a trio for several important engagements. Dutch TV show Hoopla, their first John Peele session, and it just kind of stuck. The Animals, Booker T and the MGs and the Doors were all organ forward groups of their time. But there is no other group in rock and roll history right now that is a trio of just organ, bass, and drums. All you got is the Soft Machine. The first Hendricks tour was typically messy. Lots of zigzagging around the country. It was plagued by sound issues throughout. The Softs keep stage theatrics to a minimum and the auditory bizarre to the max.

[00:19:04]Chaos aside, the Softs were able to make an impact state side, which is remarkable considering their opening for rock and roll's latest Messiah. The Softs are able to establish a stateside home base in New York at the scene. In midappril of 1968, two years after formation and nearly four after they've started playing together, the Soft Machine finally have an opportunity to record their debut album. Mike Jeffrey got them a deal with ABC subsidiary Probe, a $50,000 advance for two albums.

[00:19:39]This will become important later. Chaz got them in the door at the record plant. This was again thanks to the Jimmy Factor. He was recording Electric Lady Land there. Chaz also links The Softs up with producer Tom Wilson. He has a history recording jazz. He signed The Mothers of Invention and The Velvet Underground to Verve and produced both their wacky debuts on paper. It's great in practice. The studio's rudimentary technology, even for its time, cut the soft sound down at the knees. Not to mention the physical limits of a single album put a serious hamper on the soft's typically lengthy improvisations. Factor in Chandler's insistence upon efficiency, and the softs get just 4 days to get everything down on tape with very little overdubbing. No one was particularly happy with how the record came out, least of all the guys. Kevin said, quote, "We started out with some very good ideas, but that album was amateur-ish, sloppy, badly produced, a nightmare. Now that I look back on it, I think Tom thought we were a bunch of little white playing this unfky, cerebral cotterwalling. Between recording and release, two very consequential things happen. Number one, Andy Summers joins the band. For those of you keeping track at home, we are on lineup number four now. and two, this is how they go on their second tour with the experience. Kevin was all about the rock and roll lifestyle the first time around. Not so much now. He's on a macrobiotic diet. He's cut out all drink and drugs and he stays in most nights reading a book. And he's become disillusioned with the industry. He saw his friends getting screwed over left and right, particularly Jimmy and his old friend from Floyd, Sid Barrett. And Kevin is feeling some type of way about the softs being a fourpiece again. At a certain point, he realizes if the soft machine are going to be a trio again, he's going to have to be the one that makes that happen. While all of this is going on, Probe seemingly forgets this record exists. This is where we're going to put a pause on the story for now because we have an actual record to introduce. The track listing of the soft machine goes as follows.

[00:22:14]Opening up side one, we have hope for happiness followed by joy of a toy. Then a hope for happiness repreze followed by why am I so short? Then so boot if at all and side one closes with a certain kind. Opening up side two, we have Save Yourself, followed by Priscilla, then Lullaby Letter, next We Did It Again, then Plubel [ __ ] Puell, then Why Are We Sleeping? And the album closes with box 254 lit. The Soft Machine self-titled debut was released in November of 1968, and when it did hit the shelves, it faced an uphill battle. For one, the softs possess not a lick of commercial potential. You couldn't really pull a single from this. Apparently, the best they could do was Kevin's joy of a toy backed with Why Are We Sleeping? Then you factor in the insane competition in November of 1968.

[00:23:14]Lady Land, the White Album, Beggar's Banquet. If the Kinks were squashed by the big three, you can imagine how the Softs fared. Their album missed out entirely on the Billboard Hot 100. It charted for 9 weeks, peaking at number 168. Wait, the Billboard charts? What do you mean the album wasn't released in Britain? Where the group was bloody from? Did Probe want the softs to fail?

[00:23:43]I couldn't turn up any conclusive answer as to why the Soft Machine's first record wasn't issued in the UK. I only got vague illusions to quote various legal problems. While Mike went home to London after the second tour with Jimmy, Robert cut some demos with null reading and headed out to LA for a while. When he got back to New York in December, he gets a call from Probe saying the album is great and they're ready to send the softs out on tour. Wait, what album?

[00:24:11]What tour? Robert and Mike are gently reminded that they signed a two album deal with Probe and they didn't have much of a choice in the matter. 50 grand is on the line. They need to uphold their end of the deal. All they had to do was, you know, brush the cobwebs off, get back in the saddle, and call Kevin.

[00:24:34]Hey, where's Kevin?

[00:24:40]Kevin? Kevin Sold is based in Reading and off to Spain. You cannot make this [ __ ] up. The remaining soft machine is left in a serious pickle for what feels like the fifth time already in this episode. If they don't find someone, anyone to fill Kevin's place, Probe will sue for breach of contract and they'll never work again. Who the hell is going to fill in for Kevin? Uh, what about the roadie? Ex David Allen trio/quartet member Hugh Hopper is drafted to play the bass once more. Hugh Soft Machine Mark five. And that is how you get through five lineups of a band in 30 minutes. And people say I'm not efficient. Had the Soft Machine not signed their two album deal, they never would have had to make more music together and probably wouldn't have done so. The Soft Machine would have been a one album wonder, a curio of UK psych /to Prague and nothing else. Maybe lost to the sands of time. So, what do I think of The Soft Machine?

[00:26:00]Given this is a quirky, goofy, ambitious, and at times self-conscious curio of the best represented year on this series, 1968.

[00:26:11]I should have loved this record from the get-go. But for weeks, this thing fought me. I'd make it to about a certain kind, a song I knew I liked and I'd have to tap out halfway through. This album tires out my ear in a way few others can. And we're given absolutely no time to adjust. The record opens on an amoebic crawl, heavy on the psychedelic end of the soft machine sound. The first about 2 minutes of Hope for Happiness are slow and atmospheric, as if they've burst from a EUO light show. A short drum roll cracks open on Robert's falsetto in freef fall. His airy thin voice, almost a weeze at times, is well suited to these slower passages. It'll be interesting to hear how his voice copes when things do pick up. Fragmented phrases and childlike babbling swirl around Mike's droning organ and the one note pulse of Kevin's bass. Right now, we're still feeling the shock of being shot into this environment. this great burst of energy before being frozen in place. Rimsh shots that clatter between the left and right channels draw the listener in after this initial smack in the face. It has a hypnotic effect, especially Robert sustaining some of his notes until he's out of breath.

[00:27:33]Gradually, Mike amps up the volume until Hope for Happiness bursts open a minute and 45 seconds in. Robert's voice is doubletracked with heavy reverb applied to handle a more robust arrangement here. How his lines snake in and out of each other, finishing each other's sentences. No one part has the melody or harmony. It's disorienting. Mike quickly dominates with aonal stabs, absolutely inside out chord sequencing, hairraising trills, unbroken action. There's a practical reason for Mike's prominence.

[00:28:07]If he were to take his fingers off the keys for longer than a moment, he'd start feeding back into his comically large amp stack. And as he put it, I got sick of guitarists having all the balls.

[00:28:19]Robert said Mike's keyboard playing. I think even he was surprised at how it came out. Like a scientific experiment.

[00:28:26]Suddenly you put this acid with that acid, you go boom, and you think blimey.

[00:28:30]Mike deals a thrilling organ solo, which Robert responds to in wordless vocalizations. is not to be outdone by Robert's flashy drumming. Kevin toiling away just barely keeps Mike and Robert in the same musical universe. As the band locks down on a menacing trod, strange wheeling and cranking noises are dubbed in. This is the psychedelic 60s.

[00:28:55]We do love a good sound effect. Just when you think you found your footing with Hope for Happiness, its skull is cracked open on a rock. Kevin's joy of a toy spills out. This groove is thick and viscous, as if the listener is a bug trapped in amber or floating in a sensory deprivation tank. It's fuzzy in the head. Kevin's lumbering, heavily affected baseline hangs over Robert's low rumbles and rim shots that crackle from left channel to right. It's all Elvin Jones in that first part of Love Supreme.

[00:29:37]I also hear a lot of influence from Mitch Mitchell. He was doing something pretty similar on that spacey middle part of 1983.

[00:29:52]Kevin is noisy and so high on his fretboard. I was convinced he'd switch to a Waw Wa guitar. But no. According to Graham Bennett's text, there is not a note of guitar played on this album.

[00:30:05]Mike's humming organ intrudes, pulling the rubber band until it snaps back, and we are rocketed into a short repreeze of hope for happiness. Don't ask me what the hell Robert is singing about because I don't know. A short staggered drum solo heads a free jazz burst of sound.

[00:30:23]We get sharp slivers of backtrack snare clatters. Another parallel to Jimmy.

[00:30:29]This time if six was nine.

[00:30:31]>> Got my own life to live.

[00:30:35]>> I'm the one that died when >> ends the first of three sweets on this album. Why am I so short? Once existed as Hughes I should have known. This also spawn the track to follow. So boot if at all. Why am I so short? Is where we hear that irreverent 60s London Underground sense of humor, the cool kid sense of humor, where the absolutely mundane liking an egg and some tea, having a yellow suit your girlfriend Pam made you is silly. This song must have been a riot when the guys were stoned. Robert's own brand of this humor is self-deprecating. He's nearly 5'7 tall.

[00:31:15]He likes to smoke and drink and ball, but best of all, he likes to talk about him. He's laughing at himself, dimmunitive stature and fashion victim status before we can. This slides right into so boot, if at all. Someone more English than me is going to have to explain that phrase to me. You'd be forgiven for mistaking this screeching solo for a guitar at first, but no, it's Mike getting an absolutely nutty sound out of his organ. Apparently, the guys knocked this out in one take. Good on them. They show great chemistry. Trills worthy of a powdered wig on one hand are underscored by playing one of two baselines in the other. Kevin takes a funky repeating baseline for himself. A power trio needs a ground wire. The experience had null reading. The softs had Kevin. I'm thankful he wasn't a jazz head like the others because if he was, this thing would be damn near unlistenable. He pops in with elastic licks here and there. Mike and Robert are at critical mass already. We don't need anything else. Their dialogue is fabulous. Robert plays with time sig.

[00:32:26]Both play with dynamics to keep this thing going for 7 minutes. Robert solos for like three whole minutes. very speeded piano bits fly past him as if the contents of the music box have spilled into a tornado. Having heard a certain kind on its own, I was floored by how this fit into the Why am I so short suite?

[00:32:55]Putting out Joy of a Toy was the single was a mistake. It should have been a certain kind. It's everything the trio soft machine were good at rolled into a compact and fairly digestible four minutes and change. Robert's soft voice is well suited to this organ-driven love song. Maybe the only grounded lyric on the whole LP. It's tender and conversational. A certain kind of love, I'd say, exists for me every day and every night. Your kind of love sets me alike, and I know it's real. It's what I feel. This is the song that sold me on the soft machine. It has that pop sensibility and it puts their creativity on show. Tell me what other band would break this into a bosan noa section.

[00:33:51]There's a verse, there's a middle eight, there's a chorus, there's even a melody, and it's catchy. You'd never know.

[00:33:59]Robert found it difficult to sing and play at the same time. He's firing off those snare rolls like it's no big deal.

[00:34:06]The softs were capable of a pop sensibility. They just chose to escue it most of the time. However, when they do melt it into a powerful ballad, it's magic. Mike plays us out with a bittersweet lament, building into a crescendo of Tony. And that closes side one. Side one is much stronger than side two. The opening, save yourself, is mauled by this high-pitch noise. I was fiddling with my settings on my sound system cuz I thought something was feeding back into something else. I checked on Kobas. I checked on Spotify.

[00:34:43]This is just how it is. I'm unsure if this was a goof in the mixing process or static they just couldn't scrub in post.

[00:34:50]Mike's tumbling lines down the organ and carnival ride seesawing is fun. I even dig Kevin's horrifically out of tune bass, but it's wrecked by whatever is going on here. This melts into short, groovy instrumental Priscilla, named after Mike's longtime girlfriend. Yes, Mike had a girlfriend. Yes, Mike was married to Marsha Hunt. Yes, Marsha Hunt had a kid with MC Jagger. It's all very complicated and not nearly as bigous as it sounds. It modulates down into an anxious pulse, giving way to lullabi letter. Our narrator is hopelessly trying to woo this girl. I've got lights on in my brain.

[00:35:31]We'll have fights in the rain. Ah, yes.

[00:35:34]A girl's two main priorities in a relationship. Emotional instability and the lights being on. Graham Bennett mistakes Lullabi for quote the most accessible song on the album. Mike deals another thrilling organ solo. And Kevin does some more funky waw wa bass stuff playing chords in between. But I can't imagine this >> fairing well on the radio. And this is another fabulous show of the soft's creativity. I thought that this noise was one of the guys with his hands cuped over his mouth and whistling. It's actually Robert creating a little whistle of feedback by taking his cans, holding them over his microphone, and pressing the drivers together like like that. I feel there's one major thing that could have taken Lullabi to the next level, and it's something that's missing from the whole record, frankly. The volume. So many great groups of the 60s were hindered by the limitations of studio technology at the time, the softs included. The energy and sonic power that the Wyatt Rattlage and Ayes soft machine possess live is just sucked right out. Headphone whistles and one very wellplaced squawk bring us into Kevin's mindn numbing. We did it again. We did it again. We did it again. We did it again. We did it again.

[00:37:10]According to Mike, it was Kevin's idea that quote, "If you find something boring, a basic Zen concept, then in the end, you will find it interesting. If you listen to something repeated in the same way, your mind changes the structure of it each time. The ear either habituates or forces a change on itself." Kevin himself said it came from quote the Sufi thing of dervish dances, the repetition of a straight rhythmic figure which promotes release from all the things that one finds difficulty in releasing normally. The guys could stretch this drone out to nearly an hour live since their audiences were high as hell. No one gave a damn. They might have even enjoyed it. I think 3 minutes and 46 seconds is plenty. Unpopular opinion, I don't know. By the end, we did it again. no longer sounds like real words. It's like an auditory roar shock test. Different listeners will hear different things in it. Plun bell, French for prettier than a trash can, is an unexpectedly powerful one minute segue into side 2's crashing kota, settling us into the rigid groove of why are we sleeping, Kevin takes over lead again for a spoken word deal inspired by one of his favorite writers, George Grudig. It's obscure and ominous. It begins with a blessing. It ends with a curse. Making life easy by making it worse. My mask is my master. The trumpeter weeps. But his voice is so weak as he speaks from his sleep, saying, "Why? Why? Why? Why are we sleeping?" The final verse seems to be the softs looking down at the chaos they caused from overhead. My head is a nightclub with glasses and wine, the customers dancing or just making time.

[00:38:54]It seems that their magic has made some concert goers trips go from bad to worse. While David is cursing, the customers scream. Now everyone's shouting, "Get out of my dream." We've been expelled from the middle state between consciousness and sleep that this album exists in. We're played out by 254 on organ and piano, named for its ridiculous time sig 25 over4. Mike and Hugh wrote it just Mike and Hugh wrote it just to annoy Kevin the next room over and it's our you closer to this album. When speaking about can Marcus of the No Dogs in Space podcast coined the term the sound above to describe music that deliberately challenges the listener quote the sound above the level you're on. I've appropriated this term several times in my own work speaking about can and Sonic Youth's RSD release with John Oswald. The soft machine are absolutely the sound above. I think this album threw me for such a loop because a lot of what I do hear is describing what I hear. Putting the abstract into terms that you, the listener, can understand.

[00:40:06]The soft machine in a lot of ways defy categorization. Sid Smith for Louder Sound dubbed them quote genetically mutated forward-looking pop. Others put them in the lineage of psych rock. I disagree with these labels. The softs were nowhere near pop enough to be psych. Can they even be a rock group without a guitar, but they're not Prague either. I can understand where this label comes from. This album has multiple suites and their sound is heavily influenced by classical and jazz. They even get a whole chapter in Mike Barnes's history of UK Prague. But again, I'm not sure. There was virtuosity in this band. There's no doubt of that. But very little of it was intentional. Remember, only Mike was a trained musician when the soft machine formed. Their foray came from Naete, which you absolutely cannot say about Prague. Kevin said, quote, "Your best ideas happen when you're naive. Later on, you become more sophisticated and competent, but the content is rarely better. Robert summed it up with, "We weren't a pop band. We weren't a jazz band. We weren't really a rock band." I can only say psychedelic because we weren't anything else. The Soft Machine are totally unique, always surprising, and a cornerstone in the shared histories of psychedelia, jazz fusion, and Prague. and it practically invented the Canterbury scene. And it's none of these things at all. While yes, this record can put up a fight, it's totally worth the work it takes to get to the breakthrough. If you want the band that would have played at the Mad Hatters tea party, look no further than The Soft Machine. My personal favorites off this one are the hope for happiness suite, that whole brick with hope for happiness and joy of a toy. So boot if at all, a certain kind, and pubell kun poo bell into why are we sleeping. Remember if you want to keep up with all of my favorites from all the vinyl Mondays, I have a Spotify playlist linked in my description. I update it every week. And that's it. That is the first of my birthday month. I'm doing whatever the [ __ ] I want. Argue with the wall series.

[00:42:30]Nope. Nope. We are not calling this a mini We are not calling this a miniseries. Miniseries areing cursed on this channel. It's the first of installments. What do you think of this album? What do you think of the soft machine? Leave a comment letting me know. I love hearing what you guys have to say about albums that I love and remember despite what some guy on the internet says. Your opinion matters. If you like what I do here, you should like this video and subscribe to my channel.

[00:43:01]I post new episodes of Vinyl Monday, Monday mornings at 11:00, a new episode of my podcast every other Friday at noon. And if you so choose, you can join the freaking peanut gallery, becoming a member of my Patreon, where you get uncensored, which will definitely have to be the case for this week's album, extended cuts of regular Vinyl Monday episodes, little updates as to sources that I buy. One of the main sources for this episode came from the patrons, and a monthly exclusive video. It gives a little extra support to what I do. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you guys next time.

[00:43:45]Bye.