Urban Clashes, Invented Languages and Gigs in Psychiatric Hospitals: French Lost Music Revolution of 1968
The seismic impact that the month of May 1968 had on the France's culture has become widely chronicled. The student demonstrations, which broke out at the university prior to extending throughout the country, accelerated the end of the Gaullist regime, politically awakened French philosophy, and generated a surge of radical films.
Far less understood – outside France, at minimum – about how the transformative ideas of 1968 expressed their musical side in musical expression. One Down Under performer and writer, for instance, was aware of barely anything about France's non-mainstream music when he discovered a crate of old LPs, categorized "France's prog-rock" on a before Covid trip to Paris. He became amazed.
Below the underground … the musician of Magma in 1968.
There existed the group, the expanded ensemble making compositions infected with a John Coltrane rhythm and the symphonic pathos of the composer, all while vocalizing in an invented dialect known as the language. Also present was another band, the synthesizer-infused cosmic rock band established by the musician of the band. Red Noise included anti-police messages throughout tracks, and yet another band created poppy pieces with outbreaks of woodwinds and rhythm and continuous improvisations. "I hadn't encountered enthusiasm like this after discovering German experimental music in the end of 1980s," recalls the writer. "This was a genuinely underground, instead of merely alternative, scene."
The Brisbane-native artist, who experienced a amount of musical achievement in the eighties with independent ensemble his previous band, completely developed passion with these groups, resulting in further journeys, long conversations and currently a publication.
Revolutionary Origins
What he found was that France's musical transformation stemmed from a frustration with an previously globalised anglophone status quo: music of the 1950s and sixties in European the continent typically appeared as generic carbon copies of Stateside or UK artists, including Johnny Hallyday or other groups, France's answers to Elvis or the British band. "They thought they must vocalize in the language and appear comparable to the band to be qualified to produce sound," Thompson says.
Further factors influenced the passion of the era. Before 1968, the Algerian struggle and the France's government's harsh stifling of protest had politicised a generation. Fresh artists of French rock performers were opposed to what they viewed authoritarian control structure and the Gaullist regime. They were looking for fresh motivations, without US whitewashed pulp.
Jazz Inspirations
They found it in African American music. Miles Davis became a regular visitor in the capital for a long time in the fifties and 60s, and members of the jazz group had relocated here from discrimination and artistic restrictions in the US. Other inspirations were the saxophonist and Don Cherry, as well as the avant-garde fringes of rock, from the artist's Mothers of Invention, the group and King Crimson, to Captain Beefheart. The minimalist approach of La Monte Young and the musician (Riley a French capital inhabitant in the sixties) was another inspiration.
The musician at the Amougies gathering in 1969.
Crium Delirium, one of the trailblazing mind-altering music groups of the French underground scene, was created by the brothers the Magal brothers, whose relatives brought them to the famous Blue Note jazz club on Rue d'Artois as teenagers. In the end of 60s, amid performing jazz in venues like Le Chat Qui Pêche and travelling across the country, the musicians came across another artist and Christian Vander, who eventually create the band. The movement commenced take shape.
Artistic Revolution
"Groups including the group and the band had an instant influence, encouraging further individuals to establish their personal bands," explains the writer. The musician's group invented an entire genre: a hybrid of jazz fusion, orchestral rock and contemporary classical sound they named Zeuhl, a term meaning roughly "spiritual power" in their invented tongue. It still attracts artists from throughout the continent and, most notably, the Asian nation.
Following this the urban confrontations, initiated when students at the university's Nanterre branch protested against a restriction on co-ed dormitory interaction. Nearly each band referenced in the volume took part in the demonstrations. Various artists were creative learners at Beaux-Arts on the Left Bank, where the people's workshop produced the iconic 1968 artworks, with messages such as La beauté est dans la rue ("Art is on the streets").
Student activist the figure speaks to the Paris crowd subsequent to the evacuation of the Sorbonne in May 1968.
