The Soft Machine – The Soft Machine (Barclay) album art
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”.
