Soft Machine - Seven (1973) [Reissue 2007]

Posted By: gribovar

Date: Jan. 8, 2024

Soft Machine's revolving door of personnel changes continued with 1973's Seven, the last Softs album with a numbered title and also the last released by Columbia. Bassist Hugh Hopper was gone, replaced by Roy Babbington, a guest musician on 1971's Fourth who had played bass with Nucleus. Two other Nucleus alumni, keyboardist/reedman Karl Jenkins and drummer John Marshall, were on board as well, and since keyboardist/composer Mike Ratledge was now the band's only founding member (actually, Hopper wasn't an original member either, having replaced Kevin Ayers for Volume Two), the group's links to their early years seemed increasingly tenuous - and would become more so. Yet when Jenkins had joined the group prior to Six, following the departure of saxophonist Elton Dean, he seemed to bring an intuitive grasp of how Soft Machine could continue moving forward in the band's jazz-rock years while retaining touchstones to the past. A less assertive saxophonist than Dean, Jenkins played multiple reeds but didn't really match Dean as an improviser; his main contributions in the future would be as keyboardist and composer in the ever-evolving Soft Machine style of jazz-rock. And on Seven, he penned seven of the album's 12 tracks, beginning to assume the band leadership role that Ratledge - who composed four tracks - shied away from. With Jenkins edging closer to the band's creative center, the Softs forged ahead with their riff- and ostinato-based music, keyboard and reed melodies intersecting at unexpected angles with streamlined yet often odd-metered bass and drums, all flowing forward with muted, spacy sonorities and sometimes hypnotic repetition (and, of course, bridges or codas of echoing keyboard loops).

Ratledge composed a trio of connected tracks for Seven, a mini-suite beginning with the modal 9/8 "Day's Eye," including a solo feature for him to cut loose with his patented fuzz organ tone, bridging through the brief burst of "Bone Fire" (which puts Jenkins through his paces on baritone sax) to the truly heavy "Tarabos," its bass/keyboard vamp pulling upward and resolving at skewed points along an 18-beat sequence while Jenkins solos wildly with a signal splitter on his horn. But Jenkins sets the album's pace, beginning with the upbeat fuzzy riffing of the opening "Nettle Bed" and the drifting, dreamy "Carol Ann" through his own suite of connected tracks during the second half, including the trance-inducing "Penny Hitch," the full-throttle "Block" (building to an abrupt staccato unison conclusion), and the comparatively relaxed 5/4 vamp of "Down the Road" (featuring a fine arco acoustic bass solo from Babbington). The album ends with three minutes of spacy looping keyboards, split in two with the first part, "The German Lesson," credited to Ratledge as composer and the second part, "The French Lesson," credited to Jenkins, but there is no discernable division or musical difference between them - no doubt intended as a joke, but also an apt comment on the passing of the torch during Soft Machine's '70s jazz-rock years.

Progarchives

Tracklist:
01. Nettle Bed
02. Carol Ann
03. Day's Eye
04. Bone Fire
05. Tarabos
06. D.I.S.
07. Snodland
08. Penny Hitch
09. Block
10. Down The Road
11. The German Lesson
12. The French Lesson

Total time: 43:16

EAC log

Exact Audio Copy V1.0 beta 3 from 29. August 2011

EAC extraction logfile from 29. July 2012, 14:48

Soft Machine / Seven

Used drive : HL-DT-STBDDVDRW GBC-H20N Adapter: 1 ID: 0

Read mode : Secure
Utilize accurate stream : Yes
Defeat audio cache : Yes
Make use of C2 pointers : No

Read offset correction : 667
Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out : No
Fill up missing offset samples with silence : Yes
Delete leading and trailing silent blocks : No
Null samples used in CRC calculations : Yes
Used interface : Native Win32 interface for Win NT & 2000

Used output format : User Defined Encoder
Selected bitrate : 1024 kBit/s
Quality : High
Add ID3 tag : No
Command line compressor : C:\Program Files\Exact Audio Copy\wavpack.exe
Additional command line options : -hm %source% %dest%

TOC of the extracted CD

Track | Start | Length | Start sector | End sector
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––-
1 | 0:00.00 | 4:51.16 | 0 | 21840
2 | 4:51.16 | 3:45.03 | 21841 | 38718
3 | 8:36.19 | 5:03.23 | 38719 | 61466
4 | 13:39.42 | 0:35.47 | 61467 | 64138
5 | 14:15.14 | 4:27.71 | 64139 | 84234
6 | 18:43.10 | 3:04.13 | 84235 | 98047
7 | 21:47.23 | 1:51.58 | 98048 | 106430
8 | 23:39.06 | 6:38.44 | 106431 | 136324
9 | 30:17.50 | 4:18.48 | 136325 | 155722
10 | 34:36.23 | 5:44.25 | 155723 | 181547
11 | 40:20.48 | 1:51.62 | 181548 | 189934
12 | 42:12.35 | 1:03.38 | 189935 | 194697

Range status and errors

Selected range

Filename I:\Music\Canterbury scene\Soft Machine\Soft.Machine-Discography.1968-2010.FLAC.CUE.Lossless\1 - Studio\07 - Seven\Soft Machine - Seven.wav

Peak level 98.8 %
Extraction speed 5.8 X
Range quality 100.0 %
Test CRC C2EB6946
Copy CRC C2EB6946
Copy OK

No errors occurred

AccurateRip summary

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Track 2 accurately ripped (confidence 3) [F5AD294C] (AR v2)
Track 3 accurately ripped (confidence 3) [C75F5481] (AR v2)
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Track 7 accurately ripped (confidence 3) [246D632E] (AR v2)
Track 8 accurately ripped (confidence 3) [FA7ADF7C] (AR v2)
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Track 11 accurately ripped (confidence 3) [58C36C38] (AR v2)
Track 12 accurately ripped (confidence 3) [BE78EB4D] (AR v2)

All tracks accurately ripped

End of status report

–– CUETools DB Plugin V2.1.3

[CTDB TOCID: wWZdE6F1Go5jsN0S389rZzXgQsw-] found, Submit result: wWZdE6F1Go5jsN0S389rZzXgQsw- has been confirmed
[f9416caa] (26/26) Accurately ripped

==== Log checksum 51FBB1E9745AF364DD47F33F2E6B6977617C76A9AA4F40165B28FBA7293B9795 ====

CUETools log

[CUETools log; Date: 08.01.2024 18:43:50; Version: 2.1.4]
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Track | CTDB Status
1 | (428/430) Accurately ripped
2 | (427/430) Accurately ripped
3 | (427/430) Accurately ripped
4 | (427/430) Accurately ripped
5 | (427/430) Accurately ripped
6 | (428/430) Accurately ripped
7 | (427/430) Accurately ripped
8 | (427/430) Accurately ripped
9 | (428/430) Accurately ripped
10 | (427/430) Accurately ripped
11 | (426/430) Accurately ripped
12 | (427/430) Accurately ripped
[AccurateRip ID: 00145775-00bc9d72-970a230c] found.
Track [ CRC | V2 ] Status
01 [86b635a2|f422aa53] (015+064/227) Accurately ripped
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Offsetted by 12:
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10 [1254eb42] (014/228) Accurately ripped
11 [2675cd5b] (014/227) Accurately ripped
12 [13a0bb24] (014/226) Accurately ripped
Offsetted by 6:
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05 [2d647f42] (000/227) No match (V2 was not tested)
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11 [aba6c620] (000/227) No match (V2 was not tested)
12 [92883c0b] (000/226) No match (V2 was not tested)

Track Peak [ CRC32 ] [W/O NULL] [ LOG ]
– 98,8 [C2EB6946] [ABD104FF] CRC32
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11 93,6 [8EE727D8] [69442E18]
12 51,9 [117D97D5] [FB62C7A2]

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