In 1970, Hör Zu Black Label released a Soft Machine compilation with eleven songs from the band’s first two albums. This imprint for progressive and avantgarde music was started by German TV magazine Hör zu in 1968.

The blocky letters are from One Up, a display typeface of unclear origin. It’s shown in the 1967 and 1968 catalogs of London-based typesetting company Photoscript, in solid and outline styles, without design credits.

On the front, the unknown cover designer customized several of its letterforms: S, a, and c were all reimagined, probably to make them a bit less ambiguous and more readable. The back cover features unmodified One Up, in its Outline style.

In his liner notes, Walter Haas mentions that Kevon (Kevin) Ayres, in addition to being the lead guitarist, is an athlete and illustrator, that Robert Wyatt has mastered not only several instruments, but also lithography, and that Michael Ratledge won a philosophy prize and excels in rugby.

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One Up as shown in Photoscript’s Catalogue of Some Art Nouveau and Ornate Typefaces, 1967 (page 23, detail)

Back cover

Alternative picture of the fornt cover, with colors that probably come closer to the actual ones.

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”.

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1973 reissue of demo sessions recorded by Soft Machine in London, April 1967, and originally released under the title Faces and Places Vol. 7 in 1972.

The uncredited designer used Bottleneck (Letraset, 1972) and spaced the bottom-heavy letters so tightly that several of them join up.

The editors of Discogs point out that the colored portraits of Elton Dean, Mike Ratledge, Hugh Hopper, and Robert Wyatt show the wrong line-up: Dean and Hopper are not present on these recordings.

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Sleeve of a reissue of Soft Machine’s self-titled debut album from 1968, released in 1976 by Italian budget label Record Bazaar as The Soft Machine, vol. 1, under licence from ABC Records.

The unknown designer used two typefaces from the catalog of Mecanorma: Bronisław Zelek’s “impossible” Zelek (1972), here printed in two colors, and Mike W. Schmidt’s Art Deco (1975). The photograph is reproduced from the original album art designed by Byron Goto, Henry Epstein, and Eli Allman.

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1974 reissue of demo sessions recorded by Soft Machine in London, April 1967, and originally released under the title Faces and Places Vol. 7 in 1972.

The cover for Bellaphon’s release was designed by Patrice Larue, using two typefaces available from Letraset at the time: Odin (1972), a Letraset original by Bob Newman; and Tabasco, an early-1970s phototype design by John N. Schaedler that was adapted by the manufacturer of rubdown type in 1974.

[More info on Discogs]

“Pop at the University” – concert poster for a Soft Machine concert in Brussels, Belgium circa 1975.

CBS Records release (UK)

It’s most likely that this cover was lettered by hand based on the typeface Epic / Hollywood aka Cinema. In the US version of the sleeve, Franklin Gothic replaces Cinema for the band name.

Columbia Records release (US)