Soft Machine

Formed in Canterbury, England in 1966 in the wake of the Wilde Flowers, Soft Machine coalesced around Mike Ratledge, Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers and Daevid Allen, taking a name borrowed from William S. Burroughs. Soft Machine’s beginnings are rooted in the London underground and a very free form of English psychedelia, still audible on The Soft Machine (1968), before a swift shift toward more fragmented writing, extended forms and an increasingly emphatic jazz-rock on Volume Two (1969), Third (1970) and Fourth (1971). As personnel changed — notably with Hugh Hopper, Elton Dean, John Marshall, Karl Jenkins, Allan Holdsworth and later John Etheridge — Soft Machine moved away from the song format to develop largely instrumental music based on improvisation, saxophone unisons and a mobile rhythmic approach, sitting between progressive rock, fusion and the Canterbury aesthetic. The group dissolved at the end of the 1970s after albums such as Fifth (1972), Bundles (1975) and Softs (1976), reappeared intermittently with Land of Cockayne (1981), then resurfaced more permanently as Soft Machine Legacy before reclaiming the name Soft Machine in 2015. The current lineup, led by John Etheridge with Theo Travis, Fred Thelonious Baker and Asaf Sirkis, continues this trajectory on Hidden Details (2018) and Other Doors (2023).