I love this record and at the time I thought it was an interesting change for the band. I remember being excited over Alan Holdsworth's guitar playing. Soft Machine were always eclectic within sections of their albums. "Bundles" had a flowing atmospheric type piece called "Floating World". Originally I heard Soft Machine creating this style of soundscape on "Six"....but this piece was a bit more stylistically based on what Jade Warrior would produce during their Island label period. An album with some wild improvisation and yet it created an atmosphere . That impressed the hell out of me when I picked it up on LP in '75. Although other instrumental bands like Weather Report etc....were releasing albums in this style....Bundles was quite different because it didn't tone down in the areas of the musicians choice in sound. For example...in Hatfield And The North the guitar played a certain style of distorted sounding chord work which gave the music a Prog sound and Holdsworth was actually doing the same...except Bundles was all instrumental. On Gong "Gazeuse" you can hear a heavy distorted 5/chord work .not quite Metal..but Prog as opposed to several Jean-Luc Ponty albums where the fusion guitar is distorted but a galaxy away from producing the overall sound that Soft Machine had produced on Bundles.
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