With Understanding Comes Appreciation
From start to end, this album is an absolute killer. Every single second is just excellent, the listener cannot lose his attention on the music. Last one with Robert Wyatt, Third is by far Soft Machine's best offering. With four pieces of approximately 20 minutes each, mainly instrumental, the musicians push back the frontiers of space modal jazz-rock and avant-garde far beyond.
Hard to believe this is the same band who released their first two albums full of psychedelic and often poppy tunes. It still blows my mind when I think of what they created here. This is without a doubt one of the greatest recordings of all time. Interesting that they brought in some guests here, it's not something they had done in the past or would do in the future. Again, it just seems like everything about this album is special. Very cool that Jimmy Hastings is one of the guests here playing flute and bass clarinet. This was originally released in 1970 as a double album with 4 side long suites.
The recording of "Volume Two" marks the undisputed watershed in the career of Soft Machine, who since 1969 have been experiencing their most inspired and prolific creative period. Immediately after the release of their second album, in May 1969, Robert Wyatt, Hugh Hopper and Mike Ratledge participated in the recording sessions of "The Madcap Laughs," Syd Barrett's solo debut; they then collaborated, in the summer of the same year, with Kevin Ayers for the creation of "Joy of a Toy," alongside characters such as David Bedford and Rob Tait (who would later also collaborate with Lol Coxhill and Mike Oldfield). The album was released in November by the newly formed Harvest, after another collaboration with Kevin Ayers (this time by Robert Wyatt alone, under the pseudonym of "Whack Skins" to avoid contractual complications) for the 45 rpm single "Soon Soon Soon," in September, although the piece was not released by Harvest before 1976 on the "Odd Ditties" compilation. Finally, in October they performed at the Actuel Music Festival, where they shared the stage with very important artists of the time such as Caravan, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and Pink Floyd.
The artistic maturation of Soft Machine, dealing as session men or collaborators with increasingly different and elaborate realities, leads the group to harbor a growing musical frustration due to its dimension as a power trio: the group's scores become increasingly articulated and complex, while the performance of the pieces, entrusted to only three people, forces the band to contain their compositional ambitions, having to limit themselves to the (although imaginative and creative) format of the psychedelic rock of the first two works. Already in May, Wyatt had tried to resolve the issue by proposing to Brian Hopper to join the band as the fourth member, but his collaboration was limited to a few dates in the summer of 1969 and the recording of approximately ninety minutes of drones, minimalist experiments and jams psychedelics that proceeded on a totally different path from the one taken by the group on "The Soft Machine" and "Volume Two." These tapes, edited and cleaned of the noises and inaccuracies of the original recordings, will be published in 1996 by Cuneiform with the title "Spaced," and represent a unique testimony to the stylistic evolution of the group between the Sixties and Seventies.