Search - Soft Machine :: Grides (W/Dvd)

Sacre Bleu!

Robert Carlberg | Seattle | 06/11/2006

(4 out of 5 stars)

"This October 25, 1970 concert was recorded in Amsterdam, between "Third" and "Fourth." It finds Mike Ratledge's organ and Elton Dean's (R.I.P.) saxello spinning out great billows of notes supported by the rhythm section of Robert Wyatt & Hugh Hopper. The nine highly-composed tracks leave spaces for all four soloists to go off on their own independent journeys, alternating between chaos & order, free-jazz & composed, raucous & harmonic. The result is intellectually daring, stridently in-your-face and never restful.



These are great recordings, and wonderful packaging, and archeologically illuminate the evolution of the LP versions, especially with the aid of Aymeric Leroy's lucid liner notes which explain exactly which parts were dropped, rearranged or added later."

Pretty good audio, but the DVD footage has a choppy digital

guitarguy | everywhere | 10/13/2006

(3 out of 5 stars)

"I really wanted to see this DVD footage in top form, as I had a bootleg videotape version of this footage. But i noticed their DVD version has a noticeably distracting digital choppy look, like an internet video that's been compressed at a lower than optimal sample rate. My original 70's bootleg version of this footage, while less than perfect to say the least, was smooth and did not have any digital choppiness of course. So how could they let the digital choppiness get thru on this? Also, they digitally edited some things out. Originally, superimposed text saying SOFT MACHINE as the players names would fade in over the footage, but they took it out on the DVD. No big deal losing that, as it covered up the playing, but I seem to remember that some of the background "psychedelic" images were different in the original too, and I'm all for authenticity. But my big gripe is the digital choppiness makes this look like an internet video rather than the real 70's film footage it is. I have other DVD's with many of these 70's radiobremen/musikladen/beatclub videos by other early 70's groups, and they are all perfectly smooth and not digital looking, so why couldnt cunieform get it right with this footage? I hope they redo it someday. And I hope any other DVD's they make come without the digital choppiness. I emailed the company about this, and all they said was "then enjoy your bootleg". oh well. Am I asking too much to not see digital artifacts that I know should not be there? I really wanted to see this footage in it's glory, looking perfectly analog like I know it should have. sorry to be a nitpicking complainer."

Disappointing DVD

Marc-Olivier Becks | Brussels, Belgium | 03/07/2007

(3 out of 5 stars)

"I agree with "guitarguy" about the poor production of the DVD. Archival footage from "Beat Club" at Radio Bremen was officially released for other bands (Yes, Deep Purple, ...) and the quality is great for these other releases. But here, for the Soft Machine footage, it seems that Cuneiform used wrong tools to convert the original PAL format onto NTSC: the resulting video is choppy and to me it's the result of a very very poor PAL to NTSC conversion process. Why they failed for such a basic video work, is a mystery. Even with basic tools on PC, I can perform better conversions. To me they should re-issue it either in its original PAL format, or to use professional tools and technicians for the video conversion.

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