Page 42 - Soft Machine News Today

The Plastic People of the Universe: How the violent suppression of a rock band led to revolution in Czechoslovakia Mark Beaumont © Provided by The Independent With just 24 hours’ notice, word would circulate – the name of a train station in Prague whispered around bars and colleges. The following day, the children of the “second culture” would arrive at the station to find a secretive contact with details of which remote village they should buy a ticket to. On arrival,...

Last modified on Tue 23 Mar 2021 14.35 EDT In 1971 John Russell left the remote Romney Marshes of Kent for London’s booming avant-arts scene as a 17-year-old blues and Frank Zappa fan, and was soon playing the guitar in such unrecognisable ways that even his contrarian Mothers of Invention hero might have raised an eyebrow. Russell, who has died aged 66 of cancer, was the polar opposite of a guitar star - an obdurate original in the spiky mould of his influential teacher and mentor Derek Bail...

Gigulate Soft Machine Released “Fourth” 50 Years Ago Today 50 years ago today, Soft Machine released Fourth. Wordless choruses. Read Alec Ounsworth (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah) in MAGNET on Robert Wyatt: The post Soft Machine Released “Fourth” 50 Years Ago Today appeared first on Magnet Magazine.

Patrick Clarke , February 26th, 2021 09:33 Here are ten essential albums and EPs that we at tQ have been loving this last month, as well as a smattering of superb singles With the recent announcement that the end of June could mark the final end of coronavirus restrictions on social contact, paving the way for a summer of actual real life gigs that wont kill anyone we love, theres been a wave of newfound hope among a British music scene thats spent a year being battered to the point of near co...

this episode is no longer availablePlaylist Bob Dylan and Tom Wilson in the studio. Source: Wikipedia. Black History Month special: Tonight Sing Out salutes  TOM WILSON, the first African-American producer at a major record company (Columbia Records). The Harvard grad’s role in the recording studio in the 1960s changed all of our lives and pushed musicians to change the sound of music itself, from producing the first Sun Ra album in 1957 (on Wilson’s short-lived label Transition), the only...

Cuba is the island that taught America how to dance. For much of the 20th century it provided the United States (and, by extension, the Western world) with every key dance craze: the mambo, the rumba, the cha-cha-cha, the charanga, the bugalu. When jazz moved into the concert halls it was the Afro-Cuban influence that kept bebop on the dancefloor. And, throughout the 1940s and ’50s Havana was where American hedonists went to party. But then came Fidel, and Che, and the 1959 revolution, and...

ABC Radio Nationals The Music Show clocks up 30 years on air By presenter Andrew Ford SunSunday 14 Andrew Ford interviewing a trumpeter on the streets of New Orleans in 2000. ( Print text only Youll have to imagine the anticipation. Its a Saturday morning in May 2008, and as usual The Music Show is live in the studio. Im quite used to speaking to famous musicians, but this morning its one of the great jazz musicians of all time. Sonny Rollins has played with Bud Powell and Charlie Parker, Miles...

VVISIONSS. Its not that VVISIONSS, the art-rock foursome that formed three years ago, claims to see the future, but they also dont not claim to see the future, either. OK, so its not the entire band that has this ability, but band leader Ben Van Camp, who studied under Matthew Smith (Outrageous Cherry) and refers to a theory about kids with scarlet fever à la William S. Burroughs. Confused? Dont be. "I have this vision, man," ...

Photograph by Fay Godwin The son of an English businessman, J. G. Ballard was born and raised in Shanghai. For the past twenty-odd years, he has lived more or less anonymously in Shepperton, a dingy, nondescript suburb of London lying under the approach to Heathrow Airport. Ballard’s writing is so often situated within the erotic, technical, postholocaust landscape, and so often concerned with the further reaches of postmodern consciousness, that it is inevitably rather droll to come upon the...

Interviewed by Conrad Knickerbocker   Firecrackers and whistles sounded the advent of the New Year of 1965 in St. Louis. Stripteasers ran from the bars in Gaslight Square to dance in the street when midnight came. Burroughs, who had watched television alone that night, was asleep in his room at the Chase Park Plaza Hotel, St. Louis’s most elegant. At noon the next day he was ready for the interview. He wore a gray lightweight Brooks Brothers suit with a vest, a blue-striped shirt from Gibral...