Soft Machine – Slightly All The Time: Recordings 1970–1974
Soft Machine revisit a defining period of their career with an extensive 14-CD and three-Blu-ray archival box set
Soft Machine – Slightly All The Time: Recordings 1970–1974
Format: 14 CD – 3 Blu-ray box set
Label: Sony Music
Release date: 30 October 2026
Soft Machine revisit a defining period of their career with an extensive 14-CD and three-Blu-ray archival box set.
Formed in Canterbury during the mid-1960s, Soft Machine developed a distinctive musical identity shaped by jazz improvisation, progressive rock, psychedelia and avant-garde experimentation.
By the beginning of the 1970s, the group had entered one of its most significant periods, with Robert Wyatt, Mike Ratledge, Elton Dean and Hugh Hopper forming the central line-up heard on its early CBS recordings.
Soft Machine with Elton Dean, Hugh Hopper, Mike Ratledge and Robert Wyatt – press photo
Sony Music will release ‘Slightly All The Time: Recordings 1970–1974’ on 30 October 2026. The collection brings together the five albums Soft Machine recorded for CBS during this period: ‘Third’, ‘Fourth’, ‘Fifth’, ‘Six’ and ‘Seven’. Each album has been newly remastered from the original quarter-inch tapes.
The box set also contains all surviving BBC sessions from these years, around half of which are previously unreleased.
Rare and previously unavailable concert recordings from the United Kingdom, France and Switzerland are included alongside an alternative set of recordings from the sessions for ‘Fifth’.
Together, the material documents a period in which the band’s line-up continued to evolve, including the arrival of Welsh composer and multi-instrumentalist Karl Jenkins.
Three Blu-ray discs add more than six hours of audio-visual material sourced from European television archives, most of it previously unreleased.
Among the featured performances are Paris 1970, Brussels 1971, the complete Berliner Jazztage concert and BBC television appearances on An Anatomy Of Pop and Full House.
Website: https://www.softmachine.org/
Tracks:
The supplied press material does not include the complete track-by-track listing for this seventeen-disc collection.
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