Floating World Live

This CD marks the first release of a live performance by Soft Machine's Bundles line-up featuring Allan Holdsworth on guitar. This concert, recorded for Radio Bremen in January 1975, consists of most of the Bundles material, which hadn't yet come out although in the can since the previous summer, plus a couple of band improvs and solo showcases for Mike Ratledge, Roy Babbington and John Marshall. That era of the legendary UK pioneers of jazz-rock, Soft Machine, was unique in that, taking the band's long established tradition of continuous change to an extreme, when Holdsworth joined all the previous repertoire was abandoned, literally at once, in favour of brand new material written by Karl Jenkins and, to a lesser extent, Mike Ratledge. This made the new Soft Machine even more difficult to compare with its predecessors, and gave the band a well-deserved chance for critical reappraisal. At long last, reviewers stopped bemoaning the loss of the band's father figures to judge the new line-up on its own merits. As a consequence, positive reviews again began to pour in, and 1974-75 was to prove Soft Machine's second golden age in many respects.