“I shared a flat with Roger Waters and Rick Wright in the mid-1960s, when they had just started Pink Floyd and I was a student at Hornsey College of Art,” recalls Peter Dockley. When the sculptor and performance artist asked them if they would do the soundtrack for his first major multimedia work, Spaced, which was planned for 1969, they had to decline. As the band was on tour almost all year round, they were obviously too busy.
Instead, they recommended the Canterbury rock band Soft Machine, and after Dockley explained the outlines of his project to the group at an initial meeting, Soft Machine worked independently on the score. Such chance encounters were quite common at the time and were in keeping with the artistic ethos of the era.
The creation of Spaced brought together a number of loose ends. A strong influence was the sculpture Development of a Bottle in Space by Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni. ‘Seeing that sculpture and how it conveyed the idea of an object phasing from solid to space, from form to formlessness, was wonderfully exciting to me,’ remembers Dockley, who studied sculpture himself. ‘I saw space as a tangible medium all around me – and it was an absolutely revelatory moment, a wonderful kind of breakthrough.’
Questioning the solidity of matter and form resonated with the experiences the artist had later during meditation, when the energy field within the physical body became a living reality, opening up a space of stillness and timelessness.
As member of a performance art group that included pioneering figures of the British art scene, such as Stewart Brisley, Peter Sedgley and John Latham, Dockley had learned a great deal about the nature and potential of happenings. He was thrilled by how things blended and cross-pollinated as the boundaries between disciplines disappeared – dance found its way into painting, music into sculpture.
Londons’s Roundhouse was the perfect venue for a performance that brought these influences together. The former railway engine shed had just been converted into an important hotspot for counterculture, psychedelic music and experimental theatre.
With a small Arts Council grant, Dockley, assisted by collaborators Jules Baker and Steve Simmonds, designed an environment with a large cruciform steel structure in the centre of the building. It resembled scaffolding, had two arms almost 30 metres long and served as the main stage for a cast of around 20 performers, which included gymnasts, kendo fighters and dancers in red, green and blue costumes that had been modified in various ways with foam rubber.
Sometimes a sitar player provided meditative moments; then the blue-clad performers gathered on the central structure and plugged transparent tubes into receiving ports on their suits, creating a network that seemed to dissolve the separation between them. A costumed performer, Mirror Man, covered in small glass mirrors, climbed to the top of a tower at one end of the cruciform structure and released clouds of dry ice vapour.
The entire room was transformed into a dynamic energy zone full of colours, light, mixed media and excitement. As the focus of the action constantly shifted, the boundary between audience and performers became blurred, with the audience having to move around the large space in order to follow the action. Soft Machine had submitted a taped soundtrack, rather than performing live. It provided an acoustic ambience in which the live action unfolded.
Together with sound engineer Bob Woolford, band members Hugh Hopper, Mike Ratledge and Robert Wyatt had spent about a week editing an hour and a half of music they had recently recorded in the studio. In an approach that was unusual for Soft Machine, they used musique concrète methods such as cutting the material with scissors, reversing it or speeding it up, and playing around with tape loops.
The final product is the band’s most experimental work. The pieces went in all kinds of directions and drew from jazz and improvised, free music.
The opener, entitled Spaced One, provided the overall framework for the piece and evoked a mysterious, dreamlike state. It can be regarded as a prototype of experimental industrial ambient music, a terrain that was to be further explored by numerous artists and musicians in the years that followed.
Spaced One is part of The White Room (1): Perpetual Drift. Read more about the mix here.
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