Robert Wyatt is having a bit of trouble remembering all the details surrounding the music on '68, a collection of recently unearthed demos he recorded while his band, Soft Machine, was on hiatus. But he's having no problem recalling what it felt like being left to his own devices in the studio for the first time, which he likens to "the child in the proverbial sweetshop—just the joy of playing, of building tracks from scratch without either following instructions or explaining to other musicians, except a patient engineer, what I was after."
Fans of British psychedelia's influential Canterbury wing, of which the Soft Machine was a pillar, are viewing '68 as a sort of minor musical holy grail, containing as it does fully realized versions of two future side-long Soft Machine classics, "Rivmic Melodies" and "Moon in June," as well as a pair of shorter tracks that would eventually find their way into the multi-instrumentalist's deep catalog. The epic tracks in particular are stunning, due in part to the way Wyatt smoothly connects seemingly disparate sections into a unified whole. "I like the way streams flow from springs, and rivers from streams," Robert shares, "sometimes slowing down over plains, then tumbling around rocks, gushing over the occasional waterfall, on down to a fertile delta, and disappearing into the sea."
Writing captivating and complex extended pieces was one thing. Capturing them on tape, on his own—especially considering the technical limitations of recording studios in 1968—was quite another. "I hardly used metronomes back then," recalls Wyatt, who sang and played guitar, bass, keyboards, and drums on the tracks. (Jimi Hendrix, who reportedly footed the bill for the recording, played bass on "Slow Walkin' Talk," and the second half of "Moon in June" features Soft Machine's Hugh Hopper on bass and Mike Ratledge on keyboards.) "I remember later reading that Stevie Wonder would do his drum tracks without a metronome, and when he got [a take] with the right feel,
he'd listen to it enough times to be ready for naturally occurring tempo fluctuations, so that the added tracks could coincide naturally. I do find that tempo fluctuations can help a piece become more organic. There is not an eleventh commandment which says 'Thou shalt keep arithmetically perfect time at all times.'"
As far ranging as Wyatt's subsequent work has been, the commitment to making music with an inarguably human feel remains. This attitude is exemplified by recent, bracing collaborations with the exploratory British duo Grasscut and with reed player Giiad Atzmon and string player Ros Stephen, and on Wyatt's last proper solo album, 2007's Comicopera. "Sometimes I'll start from a bit of home recording which may be technically dodgy but has a spontaneous feel—which is, after all, what I'm always after," Wyatt says. "This is a recurring preoccupation in what I do. I want music that lives and breathes, not a machine-tooled artifact."
Adam Budofsky
Robert
Wyatt - Taking a rare peek in the rear-view - Modern Drummer Magazine - June 2014
