Soft Machine’s band name famously was borrowed from William S. Burroughs’s 1961 novel, where it is a metaphor for the human body. This theme was picked up by the designers of the U.S. release of the self-titled debut album from 1968 – Byron Goto, Eli Aliman, and Henry Epstein – who depicted the band members tangled up in cogwheels, alongside a nude woman with a wind-up key (which soon after got censored).

Shown here is the cover of the debut album as Barclay Records released it to the French market. Cover designer Claude Caudron opted for a photomontage that emphasizes the machine part, without any human softness. Only on the back cover did Caudron reuse some of the visual elements of the original album design.

The title is set in caps from a dimensional slab serif that originated in the 19th century and went under various names, see Broadcast. In France, Deberny & Peignot revived this design in the 1930s and showed it as one of several sets of Initiales Ombrées, literally “shaded initials”.

[More info on Discogs]

A posthumous collection of short stories by Cyril M. Kornbluth, who died in 1958. Originally published under the pseudonym Cecil Corwin. Edited by James Blish and released in 1970 by Dell Publishing.

Both the author’s name and the main title get a multi-color treatment in Montgomery Pousse Cafe (1969). The subtitle uses narrow slab-serif caps with a 3-dimensional effect. This face goes back to the 1830s. It was available from PLINC as Sunset and is also known as Broadcast today. The range is completed by caps from Broadway (1927) and Lightline Gothic (1908).

William Richard "Bill" Frisell is an American guitarist, composer and arranger. He has worked with ECM, but this is a ’50s Blue Note inspired design. This is particularly shown in the secondary typeface choices of the blue Further East cover.

A bold sleeve using Perla and Perla Outline together with a circle motif suggesting the sun.