1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 187. Soft Machine – Third (1970)

 

This is the first artist since Skip Spence that I’d not heard of before, although I have, apparently heard them since they were the backing band for at least some of Syd Barrett’s Madcap Laughs – Mike Ratledge on keyboards, Robert Wyatt on drums, Hugh Hopper on bass, and Elton Dean on saxophone. Some other session musicians join them for this record on clarinet, flute, and violin.

It’s a mid-way point between electronica and jazz/rock fusion. It’s a double album, with four tracks, thus each track is an 18-19 minute piece all by itself, although some of them, notably Side 2’s Slightly All The Time sound more like disparate pieces stitched together than a lengthy coherent whole; compared, to, say Grateful Dead or Miles Davis who have both done 20ish-minute jazz-rock fusion pieces where the ongoing theme is evident.

For me, the most interesting piece was Side 3’s The Moon In June, that features vocals, although more scat and stream of consciousness than lyrical, using the voice as another instrument in the mix. The first two tracks are much closer to jazz-rock fusion but I didn’t find them as interesting as, say Bitches Brew or Hot Rats in terms of the jazz part. On what would be the second disc on an LP version, The Moon In June and Out-Bloody-Rageous become more electronica, but suffer from the same incoherence as the first half.

Normally with jazz, even the most broken down and fragmentary jazz like Thelonius Monk’s Brilliant Corners or Mingus’ Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, there’s a theme, a motif, that the music begins from, and often ends with, and usually reflects back from time to time within the piece; here, it’s more like an entire album of the broken down parts of a prog-rock tune.

I wondered as I listened to it where it fell in relation to Tangerine Dream, as I remember their really early work being a bit like this, with more fragments of sounds than actual tunes, and although Tangerine Dream were formed in 1967, their first album was in 1970, and I’d argue it’s not until 1971 when both Franke and Froese were on board that Tangerine Dream really took off.

So in that sense, this is certainly an interesting step in the evolution of electronic music, and made for some nice background listening even if it wasn’t the most exciting album; neither the electronica part nor the jazz part being particularly remarkable by themselves.