If you buy something from a link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. Hilary Pollack is the senior commerce editor at Eater. She has more than 15 years of experience in ...

For Robert Wyatt of the jazz-rock outfit The Soft Machine, picking the best song was actually quite easy. And you probably won’t be able to guess what it is, unless you’ve read ahead.

Mike Ratledge, who died yesterday aged 81, did exactly that. In the 49 years since he left Soft Machine, somebody, somewhere would be commenting that they would love to see Ratledge play live with ...

Soft Machine’s Mike Ratledge, August 1975 (Gie Knaeps/Getty Images) Soft Machine founding member and keyboard player Mike Ratledge died on Wednesday, February 5, after a brief illness, according to ...

Surrealist, satirist and beat generation figure William Burroughs has been an inspirational ... when his novel The Soft Machine – published five years earlier – became the name for a group ...

Surrealist, satirist and beat generation figure William Burroughs has been an inspirational source of ideas for musicians over the years. But the first time his work was used as a wellspring by a band ...

Mike Ratledge, the keyboardist and a co-founder of English rock band Soft Machine, has died, the band’s guitarist John Etheridge confirmed. He was 81 years old. “Incredibly sad news that my ...

Mike Ratledge, one of the founding members of Soft Machine, has died aged 81. The news of his passing was shared by bandmate John Etheridge – guitarist in the British psych-rock band – in a ...

Soft Machine founding member and keyboard player Mike Ratledge died on Wednesday, February 5, after a brief illness, according to his former bandmate and guitarist John Etheridge. “Mike was the ...

Named after the William S. Burroughs book, Soft Machine pioneered an adventurous, proggy form of psych-pop that eventually evolved into a form of jazz fusion. Though commercial success eluded the ...

Ratledge and Allen formed Soft Machine alongside Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers and Larry Nowlin in 1966, naming the group after the 1961 William S. Burroughs novel. The band underwent many lineup ...

Although he is better known for his literary works such as “Naked Lunch” and “The Soft Machine,” the multi-layered Burroughs (1914-1997) is far less known, by contrast, as a cross-media artist who ...