Urban Clashes, Created Dialects and Performances in Mental Hospitals: France's Lost Music Revolution of 1968

This massive shock that the month of May 1968 exerted on the French way of life has become extensively chronicled. The student demonstrations, which erupted at the Sorbonne prior to expanding throughout the land, hastened the end of the Gaullist government, radicalised French intellectual thought, and spawned a wave of revolutionary movies.

Much fewer understood – beyond France, at bare minimum – about how the revolutionary thoughts of 1968 revealed their musical side in musical expression. An Down Under performer and writer, for example, knew not much about French alternative rock when he discovered a box of vintage records, categorized "French progressive rock" on a pre-pandemic journey to Paris. He was blown away.

Beneath the non-mainstream … Christian Vander of Magma in 1968.

There was Magma, the expanded collective creating compositions imbued with a John Coltrane style and the musical pathos of Carl "Carmina Burana" Orff, all while performing in an invented tongue called Kobaïan. Additionally Gong, the synth-dabbed space-rock group co-founded by the musician of Soft Machine. Red Noise embedded political messages inside songs, and Ame Son made poppy arrangements with bursts of instruments and drums and continuous spontaneous creations. "I never experienced enthusiasm similar after discovering German experimental music in the end of 1980s," recalls the writer. "This was a authentically underground, rather than simply non-mainstream, culture."

The Brisbane-native artist, who had a degree of artistic success in the 1980s with indie ensemble his previous band, absolutely fell in love with these bands, leading to additional journeys, lengthy interviews and presently a publication.

Radical Foundations

What he found was that France's musical transformation came out of a discontent with an previously international anglophone status quo: art of the fifties and sixties in European Europe tended to be bland imitations of US or English artists, like French singers or other groups, France's equivalents to Presley or the Rolling Stones. "They believed they must sing in English and appear comparable to the Stones to be able to make art," Thompson explains.

Other aspects contributed to the intensity of the era. Before 1968, the Algerian conflict and the French government's brutal stifling of dissent had politicised a cohort. Fresh artists of French music performers were against what they viewed oppressive control system and the Gaullist government. They were searching for innovative influences, free of US mainstream material.

Jazz Influences

They discovered it in African American music. The legendary trumpeter had been a frequent presence in Paris for a long time in the fifties and 60s, and musicians of Art Ensemble of Chicago had relocated in France from separation and cultural limitations in the US. Additional influences were Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, as along with the innovative fringes of rock, from Frank Zappa's his band, Soft Machine and the progressive band, to Captain Beefheart. The minimalist approach of La Monte Young and Terry Riley (the latter a Parisian inhabitant in the sixties) was an additional element.

Frank Zappa at the Amougies festival in 1969.

Crium Delirium, among the groundbreaking experimental rock bands of France's non-mainstream culture, was established by the brothers the Magal brothers, whose family accompanied them to the legendary Blue Note establishment on the street as youths. In the end of sixties, between creating music in venues like "The Sinful Cat" and journeying through the country, the musicians encountered Klaus Blasquiz and the future Magma founder, who went on to create the band. The movement commenced coalesce.

Musical Innovation

"Groups such as Magma and Gong had an instant impact, encouraging additional individuals to form their personal groups," says Thompson. The musician's ensemble developed an complete category: a hybrid of experimental jazz, classical rock and modern classical sound they christened Zeuhl, a expression meaning something like "celestial energy" in their made-up language. It continues to attracts artists from across the continent and, particularly, the Asian nation.

Then came the urban battles, begun when students at the university's suburban annexe rebelled challenging a restriction on integrated residential visits. Almost each artist mentioned in the book took part in the protests. Various band members were creative learners at Beaux-Arts on the area, where the collective created the now-famous 1968 posters, with messages such as La beauté est dans la rue ("Art is on the streets").

Student activist the figure speaks to the French capital gathering following the removal of the Sorbonne in the month of May 1968.