Volumes One & Two [Import]

Soft Machine | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (December 28, 2004)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Import
• Label: Big Beat UK
• ASIN: B0000004F9
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #23,889 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)
  • #34 in Music > Indie Music > Rock > Classic Rock
  • #58 in Music > Indie Music > Rock > Progressive

Track Listings

1. Hope For Happiness

2. Joy Of A Toy

3. Hope For Happiness (reprise)

4. Why Am I So Short?

5. So Boot If At All

6. A Certain Kind

7. Save Yourself

8. Priscilla

9. Lullabye Letter

10. We Did It Again

11. Plus Belle Qu'une Poubelle

12. Why Are We Sleeping?

13. Box 25/4 Lid

14. Pataphysical Introduction-PT I

15. A Concise British Alphabet-PT I

16. Hibou, Anemone And Bear

17. A Concise British Alphabet-PT II

18. Hulloder

19. Dada Was Here

20. Thank You Pierrot Lunaire

See all 30 tracks on this disc

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

97 of 100 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My most amazing concert!, November 13, 2002

By 

James T. Jacobs (Normal, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Volumes One & Two (Audio CD)

I had third-row tickets to see Jimi Hendrix at the Virginia Beach Dome. But of course we had to suffer through some unknown opening act first, a trio called "The Soft Machine".

After the Soft Machine got through with us, Hendrix was an anti-climax! There was Kevin Ayers on bass guitar and vocals, Mike Ratledge on organ (with some extra sounds built in-first time I'd ever heard fuzz organ before), and up front was drummer and lead singer Robert Wyatt. The organ and bass were on a higher level behind Robert, who actually led the band.

They began their set, and played without a break for something like an hour and fifteen minutes, doing smooth transitions from one song to the other so that it came off like a suite of songs. Their musicianship was astonishing! And their music was so unlike anything I'd heard before (or since), that I was absolutely blown away! They quit, and the lights came back up, and as I looked around, I saw others with their mouths hanging open and their eyes wide, just as mine were. There was a moment or two of complete silence as people gathered their wits and came back down to earth. Then a standing ovation! We were completely wrung out.

I didn't know how much of what they did was planned and how much was improvised, but when I bought their first album, I was amazed to hear that the record was a short version of the concert that I had been lucky enough to see. A true psychadelic journey!

Hendrix did the smart thing when he came on. He left the lights on, and started slow, doing an intimate version of "Red House Blues" while smoking a cigarette, giving us time to recover, and slide into his vision of reality bit by bit.

Volume two is a logical extension of volume one. A bit jazzier, a bit more refined sound-wise than volume one, which was a bit on the raw side from time to time. But it's a further look at the same musical vision, and a unique one at that. The two albums work together well as a musical unit.

This is not background music, it is not dance music. It is not music that you listen to casually. It's music that will take you on an emotional journey if you give it a chance. It's somewhat free-form, not adhering to conventional song structures or chord progressions, but they used a lot of jazz and rock elements to make a music vision that was theirs and theirs alone.

If you have time and a reasonable attention span, give the Soft Machine a chance to show it to you. But please don't do as one clueless reviewer did, and judge a body of music from just listening to a few brief clips. That's ridiculous!

After their third album this group lost me. As much as I loved their music, they moved into personal avenues of expression that I was no longer able to share. Some songs sounded to me as if they inadvertantly recorded the time they spent tuning and doing sound checks and put that on the record instead of the songs. But the first two Soft Machine albums, and much of the Third, still shine as gems, as unique today as they were in the late sixties. Nothing like it before or since.

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Greatest Group of the late 1960's--maybe the best ever, July 23, 2002

By 

Gary Gomes (New Bedford, Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Volumes One & Two (Audio CD)

Soft Machine were actually friends of Pink Floyd and played with them on double bills many times. Admired by Hendrix when Hendrix came to England, he had them open for him on his first headlining U.S. tour. Friends of mine who saw them reported that Hendrix was OK, but Soft Machine was amazing.
I actually heard these two albums back about 1971, after I heard Third--Third was (and is) a phenomenal lp, holding a place in the Soft Machine catalogue close to that of Ummagumma by Pink Floyd. It was the summation of both bands' early heavily experimentational periods, and the point at which both began to formularize their sound; both groups put out two more interesting albums but eventually succumbed to repetition/commercialism in 1974. (In the case of Soft Machine, they never pulled off a "Dark Side of the Moon").

Even from their early releases, the Soft Machine were virtuosic musicians in the world of rock. Ratledge's keyboard chops were as good as -- or better than -- his most accomplished contemporaries, Keith Emerson and Brian Auger, and he is the ONLY rock keyboard player who pulled off bringing the most advanced free jazz concepts (Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman) to rock, particularly on the first album. As a keyboard player, some of the things on both albums, such as "Hope for Happiness", "So Boot if At All", "Lullabye Letter", "Hibou, Anemone and Bear", "As Long As He Lies Perfectly Still" are incredibly complicated and innovative keyboard pieces and among the reasons I still admire Ratledge thirty years later. (Ratledge's organ sound changes quite radically from the first album to the second, probably because of the amplification they were using. On the first U.S. tour, Soft Machine used Fender Dual Showman amplifiers--pretty hefty power output, but very clean sounding. Later they switched to Marshall amps, which had more power but also more distortion; they were favorites of everone f Wyatt's drumming is as good as Keith Moon's, but he knows what he is doing. Although Kevin Ayers' bass playing on the first is not quite as proficient as Hugh Hopper's on the second, Hopper was one of the finest bass players in rock; totally unique and lightning fast, so Ayers did a creditable job (especially on "Joy of a Toy" on the first lp).

This was a staggeringly good group...great but very odd. But, as one of my friends had said once, both albums are like one "great long song." You should really hear this, if only to hear what really great musicians can do when the fetters are untied. This was such a brief and shining moment in rock history...I am delighted that it was at least captured on vinyl.

Get it...this is a piece of magic captured in a jewel box.

Gary Gomes

37 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible Stuff From Those Fabulous Sixties, September 12, 2000

By 

David K. Bell (Portland, Oregon United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Volumes One & Two (Audio CD)

These albums were originally issued in the late '60's and were not extremely well known even then. But as a serious music freak of the time, I always rated these along with my top five albums of the time. So you know where I'm coming from, the others were Electric Ladyland (Hendrix), After Bathing at Baxter's (Jefferson Airplane), Live Dead and Anthem of the Sun (Grateful Dead). I consider Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper and Satanic Majesties to be precursors of the others and therefore in a different category. I guess they called the category "acid rock." These albums are more loosely associated than the others with that category, but I always thought the comparison a valid one.

Most aficionados know that The Jimi Hendrix Experience was the lead-up band on the Monkees' first U.S. tour, but who was the lead-up band on Hendrix' first tour? Yup, you guessed it, Soft Machine. "Thank you Noel and Mitch, and thank you, Jim, for our exposure to the crowd"...lyrics you can hear on this cd. Unfortunately, their exposure to the crowd did not earn them the adulation Hendrix received, and too bad, because they were probably as original and virtuosic, in their own way, as Hendrix was in his.

This music is a mixture of rock, jazz and electronics, but it's not like anything called "jazz fusion." I guess it's a little like very early Pink Floyd, but much more interesting, and you probably don't need to be tripping to appreciate it. There is much high energy playing on this record, there is much electronic experimentation, some lovely melodies. But somehow the sum equals much more than the parts in this music. These albums work as coherent pieces of music, rather than a collection of songs, although I wouldn't call them a "concept album" either, like Pet Sounds, et al. It is very interesting, very original, intellectually challenging and lots of fun. Kind of like Phish is supposed to be, but I like this better.

If you like the acid rock genre try this. There are no blues songs, and it's a little cerebral, but you'll like it. It still sounds fresh. "Third" is also superb-a double album that is probably even better than these (I know, I'm cheating on my top five list). After that, they got less interesting. But then, so did Hendrix.