INSTANTANEOUS MUSICAL DRAMA[1]

Synths, Sax & Situationists: The French Musical Underground 1968-1978

Ian Thompson  Roundtable 2025  ISBN: 978-0-6454928-0-4

reviewed by Howard Slater

 

We have always experienced our music as a war machine,
pure sound, which aims to shatter certain lines
of permanence to put in place pure intensities...

-          Richard Pinhas (Heldon)

 

Flashback to the late 70s and a coming to musical consciousness. A time when continental Europe seemed far away for many working-class families despite those holidays in the sun that the Sex Pistols lambasted. A school trip to France was to journey to the other side of the world, but only to be initiated into getting drunk, visiting chateaus and roaming the streets of Pigalle. Return to this time, as punk rock opened many peoples’ ears, and the only French music on our foreclosed horizon was the pop-puppet Plastic Bertrand (who probably propelled the term ‘plastic punk’ of which there were many as the major labels went into manufacture mode.) Yet, there were soon clues that should have been heeded. Manchester’s Factory label had a sister label called Factory Benelux (an almost incantatory word this Benelux… beneficent luxury etc), their bands played in places like Groningen and Tielt and the first release on sister independent label, Rough Trade, was by a French punk outfit, Métal Urbain. Despite these clues, there was still a sense that, as far as music was concerned, the Anglo-American sound, be it rock or pop (jazz was then just dad trad), was the weltanschauung and any other musics were laughable imitations. Thus began the struggle to break away from what could be called a monopolising cultural protectionism. For many the first stop away from nationalised normalisation and genre-capture was the underworld sleaze-drone of many Velvet Underground tracks.

Perhaps the first sonic winds from continents other than the Anglo-Saxon ones came with the sounds of reggae and dub that burgeoned alongside punk, but, in terms of rock, our punk heroes, despising the Stones and Elvis, began to mention bands like Can and Amon Düül which opened us up to a whole zone of experimentation dubbed ‘krautrock.’ To this day, perhaps, the influence of bands like Faust and Cluster, especially on the rise of electronic-based ‘industrial’ music in the early 80s, has not been fully appreciated. This is probably due to bands such as these being associated, somehow, with the category of ‘prog rock’ which became a bête-noir for punks and post-punks (Yes, Genesis etc). But as with any musical category, it proves a securitising conditioning tool for generalising-away whole swathes of possible sensuous learning and reduced the possibilities of sound to the signature brands of the most successful bands; which, as is well known, are often the ones that, hyped-up, sell the most units. So, Ian Thompson’s book is a welcome addition to the musical archaeology genre that not only does for French underground music what Julian Cope’s Krautrocksampler (1995) did for those Kosmische musicians based in Germany, but, furthermore, it contextualises this underground as having roots in the political coming-to-consciousness, the cultural free-for-all, of May ‘68 as this coincided with the arrival on the French festival scene of free jazz outfits like the Arts Ensemble of Chicago (AEC) and dissident classical musicians like those grouped as Musica Elettronica Viva.

 

If May ‘68 is seen as the province of the Situationist International (SI) then this is by no means universally accepted. Whilst it is undoubtable that, as they said, “situationist ideas are everyone’s heads,” and that they coined many of the memorable slogans of the period that resonate to this day, there is also the sense in which the SI came promote themselves as crucial to the times. Whilst this is something of a poison chalice in that May ‘68 ‘failed,’ it is also a testament to their lust for historicization that, to a degree, helped their longevity despite the existence other revolutionary theoretical currents (for example Le Mouvement Communiste and the Italian operaists) and counter-cultural scenes (2^nd Situationist International, Living Theatre, Kommune 1.) An instance of this bid for predominance, that runs counter to the communal ethos and sonic exogeny of many of the bands covered in Thompson’s book, is a scene in the film version of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, where he highlights his own head with a white circle so that his presence can be evidenced in amongst a sea of others gathered there in the Odeon Theatre. Whilst Debord went on to scorn the ‘pro-situs’, the musical agitators that feature in this book could be said to have continued “creating situations” and, in many instances (Barricade, Red Noise, Lard Free and Camizole) were wary of the commodity-form by neither rushing to produce singles and albums nor concerning themselves with turning their creativity into archival objects. This hints at one of the elements that marks the ‘Political Underground’ and ‘Avant Underground’ sections of this book: a marked sense of ‘instantaneous musical drama’ made by often fledgling musicians using all manner of instruments in groups of shifting membership (upwards of eighty in the early days of Camizole). This paradigm-defying approach to sonic agitation has striking similarities with the UK’s Scratch Orchestra, a roving band of musiking troubadours, whose sound was once described as “devastatingly amorphous.”[2]

Thompson cites the following review of a gig by Camizole that featured in Liberation: “In the middle of the drum ‘solo’, firecrackers go off at our feet, hubcaps are randomly thrown onto the cymbals disturbing and inspiring the drummer. The tenor saxophonist wanders into the hall playing, waits while two concealed speakers spew out synthesiser, then responds with a long free improvisation that breaks off at the point of physical exhaustion... Saxes, violin, synth, guitar and drums are thrown together so violently and intensely that it can’t be expressed in words... Their music lies far beyond the commonplace imagination; it’s no longer art reserved for and performed by an elite, it becomes an extension of communication where everyone has to participate.” Whilst this is not indicative of all the bands that Thompson features (there are sections on the lysergic, jazz and electronic undergrounds) we do get a sense here of the underground as extolling collective participation that not so much leads to aesthetic objects of contemplation as to a messthetics, that, as the sound of a crowd, eschews ideas of exclusive and learned access, and exceeds the purview of bourgeois art, which, today, lives on as the sonic art and over-tutored composition purveyed by Radio 3’s Late Junction and New Music Show.

Whilst Debord was rumoured to be into free jazz there is very little in the SI’s oeuvre to base this upon. Like the Parisian Surrealists before them they went cold before sonic experimentation or, as documented in this book, they had little direct interest or even remote links to L’agit-pop as it was termed by commentators in the early 70s.[3] This may seem strange as, with a hindsight enabled by research like that of Thompson’s, there is a good case to be made that the French musical underground at this time, as elsewhere, was “realising and supressing art” as the SI once called for, and which Asger Jorn, translating from the Hegelian, once fleshed-out as the “open creation.” That said, Debord became involved in an editorial capacity at Editions Champs Libre, and may very well have been closely involved in the publication of Free Jazz/Black Power by Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli. This book, translated into English in 2015, is a forceful historical and materialist study of free jazz that, unlike many post-situationist critiques of music in toto as an alienated commodity, spends much time describing how music as a social-historical practice and a theory-in-action, has political import beyond theses and manifestos. In this book the musiking of Ayler, Coltrane, Sun Ra, et al, is reclaimed as a ‘living labour’ with sonic matter: “Free jazz is characterised by an emphasis on political signalisation […] but its militant status is especially clear in that the contradictions between varied cultural codes, music materials and multiple historical traces at work in the music.”[4]

Free jazz as a melange, a bricolage, is also a key building block within the French Underground whose bands and ensembles, in Thompson’s words, often exhibit a “lack of chordal foundation.” It is this athematism, avoiding the compositional strictures of harmonic song-structures, that enables the inclusion of ‘varied cultural codes’ and a setting of these in parodic and challenging juxtapositions. This collage-effect, then, also bears a relationship to the Situationist cultural practice of détournement as the re-routing of existing materials that brings social contradictions to the fore. A key exemplar of this is described by Thompson in relation to Red Noise. He cites group-member Patrick Vian: “I wanted our music to be a kind of rubbish bin: we threw in scraps of popular songs, noises, anything, stirred it all up, and dished it out as it came. We wanted to demolish, to throw everything away. If others want to reconstruct afterwards, that’s their job, not ours.” This band, formed in live jam sessions in the courtyards of the occupied Sorbonne, only ever recorded one album and that a belated release that did little to capture the “sonic madness” of their performances which, in the words of member Patrick Vian, were intended to “exteriorise the internal rebellion” of their audiences. As Thompson notes, the opening to this album is a détournement of the French chanson and ya-ya styles as these give rise to a parody of Anglo-American rock. These styles are mocked with the toilet-humour of the lyrics (introduced by the sounds of someone taking a pee) before venturing into a long meta-categorical track. This track, titled ‘Sarcelles is the Future,’ could also be seen as echoing the early situationist interest in ‘unitary urbanism’ as Sarcelles was a one-time impoverished Paris suburb that appeared in the future as a gentrified zone.

A cornerstone of Situationist ideas was what they polemicised as the ‘revolution of everyday life’ (more or less taking a cue from PCF renegade Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life). Capital had come, as Thompson writes, to make “everything tradeable into a commodity,” and opposition to this, as it extended to the formerly untradeable, was reflected in a manifesto issued by ‘Force for Liberation of and Intervention in Pop’ (FLIP): “From now on Pop will not simply be a product of greater or lesser quality, it will be the vehicle of our revolt against the old world. It will be a subversive weapon to change life and transform the world right here, right now, everywhere that struggles are carried out: in offices, workers hostels, suburbs, council estates, schools, universities etc...” Thompson notes that the groups gathered under this banner (including Komintern, Red Noise and Fille Qui Mousse) jammed en masse from a flat-bed truck in the midst of a demonstration gathered to celebrate the centenary of the Paris Commune. However, this umbrella grouping was short lived and not simply as a result of the weight of its own polemic but at the hands of attempts to hijack it by Maoist groups like Gauche Prolétarienne (who counted J.P. Sartre as a one-time member). One more attempt was made to rhetoricise the import of underground culture with the ‘Rock Music Liberation Front’ who perhaps put into plain phraseology the Situationist maxim of ‘realising and supressing art’ in the everyday when they wrote: “Music as a separate form will be dissolved into the lived experience of everyone.”[5] 

As musician, Dominique Grimaud, offers, these shortlived attempts at explicit politicisation left their traces, but what is intriguing is that discursive practices like these weren’t concertedly pursued again until ‘The Rock in Opposition’ movement came to life in 1978 (formed by Henry Cow it included French bands like Art Zoyd and Etron Fou Leloublan). The clues for why this happened are scattered throughout this book. There is not just the risk of loose collectives and their pulling-power being instrumentalised by the Maoists (“Pop for the People”) but a growing sense that the music itself – its practice, its reception contexts and its awakening of desiring-perception – was a politicising factor that had no need to take up theoretical positions that could be recognised by the prevailing political doxas. The wilful proffering of intense musical experience by these bands (which perhaps unites them beyond genre distinction) had ramifications for a musically inspired coming-to-consciousness that, in face of the surrounding cultural and political conditioning, has, as Tim Hodgkinson argues, an ontological power: “Music is sounded between persons […] it activates that space as a dynamic ontological environment in which the listening subject comes to life.” This echoes Vian’s hopes for music-making as being able to ‘exteriorise internal rebellion’ which is tantamount to a rearticulation of the individualised person as a mode-of-becoming, that, as Hodgkinson adds “catalyses a new ontology for the political subject.”[6] What comes to life is a (listening) subject that is enabled to recognize its conditioning and from there embark on the process of overcoming the ways and means that it has been produced as an homogenous subject (homo economicus). Again, it is Vian that intuits this shift away from the ‘revolutionary subject’ of the working class and its organizational forms to the ‘subjective revolution’ (the personal is political) heralded by the post-68 profiling of a dis-alienating psycho-politics and its sense of gemeinwesen: “Revolutionary songs have been sung for a thousand years, and the revolution doesn’t look like it’s coming closer. We have to try something else...”

 

In a way Thompson’s book documents and gathers testimony of this ‘something else.’ The depth and breadth of the bands and outfits that come into a first-time focus here make this underground scene (and others like it, such as the various punk scenes that followed it) more like a movement than an easily policed niche. This was a movement that eschewed politics proper for a micropolitics (and here we, in part, mean a politics of the senses in Marx’s terms[7]) that brought desire/pleasure and its vicissitudes to the forefront of any revolutionary rearrangement: the ‘permanent play’ and ‘experimental behaviour’ that the early Situationists vouched for, and which the bands covered here seem to be enacting, is a means of resisting the reductive power of a spectacle that, to draw on R.D. Laing, encourages us all to perceive and feel the same thing.[8] The French underground’s turn towards a politics of experience comes to challenge the knowledge-based politics of the traditional Left and, more importantly, looks for other communicative forms than those that, with their dogmas and hierarchical orderings, lead to the reiteration of what amounts to standardised forms: clichéd riffs and antique slogans. These latter, being self-explanatory and self-evident amount, in the words of Hodgkinson, to the “shared nonthought” of the spectacle (and its self-objectifying musical avatars) that encases us in consumer demographic identities and the “normal grammar of agency” otherwise known as passivity.[9]

 It is this passivity (or ennui) that the Situationists lambasted and sought to arouse. However, their elevation of ‘political consciousness’ led them to become as instrumental in their definition of ‘activity’ as the Maoist groupuscules they had little time for. This ends up in a foreclosure of possible experience. There is a narrowing down as the ranks of the culture police grow and the only form permissible is that of a ‘workers council’ and the only expressivity granted a hearing is that of theoretical discourse. It is quite apposite that as the SI shrunk in the late 60s, the French underground burgeoned into life through a series of festivals that, coming along after the events of May 68, were, as Thompson documents, heavily fraught by police presence and other efforts of state control (this is very similar to the situation in the UK in the 90s with the ‘free party’ scene and the eventual passing of the Criminal Justice Act.) These festivals, less sanitized than the ‘packaged holidays’ of Glastonbury, were seen as threatening social gatherings. Of these, Thompson identifies that of Amougies (1969) as crucial. The threat here, the experiential opening, comes in the wide variety of acts propelled by the presence of free jazz outfits like the AEC. These not only profiled an improvisatory approach that was more sensually metamorphosing than Cagean ‘indeterminate music’ (giving rise to what Grimaud, in recalling the sound arising out of this period, calls “libertarian music”) but, as many of these acts travelled up from the Pan African Festival in Algiers, there was a confluence of the Black Power message and the alienated French youth. Free jazz may have given rise to ‘free-rock’ and made the situationistic idea of music as a passive and inactive consumption seem absurd, but, less articulated at the time, the Black Power message exposed European racism, questioned the eurocentric version of internationalism and thus problematised the idea of revolution in the West.[10]

If the festivals as mass gatherings were one form that enabled new forms of socialisation, then another was that of communal living. As with many free-jazz acts that can be more aptly described as ensembles (following through from the big band form) than groups or combos (the rock four-piece etc), the French groups discussed here often took on the form of multi-membership and, as with jazz players, a crossing over between groups with sub-ensembles of players forming often for only one session. Thompson draws our attention to how musical practices gave rise to communising practices that, whilst rarely successful, indicate a desire to ‘live’ the music and extend its import into everyday life. Does musiking in this way become what the SI referred to as an ‘experimental behaviour’? The recasting of a post-68 revolutionary practice (with music no longer figuring as a side-line agit-prop) begins to concern itself with seeking out new forms of life (ontological dynamism) and endeavouring to practice that ‘open creation’ which Jorn, back in 1960, offered as a “homeomorphism, variability within a unity.” The SI with its exclusions, with its eventual membership of one, may have given impetus to underground music as politicised but, despite innovations like ‘constructing situations’ and ‘the realisation and suppression of art’ it did not heed Jorn. The groups featured here, with their metamorphosing sonics and temporal scramblings, with their incorporation of non-sonorous forces and exogenous elements, not only made audible a sociate sound, but tried to extended their “instant composition” to the ways and means of living together. That these often fail may, in reference to the SI, be as much an issue of the autonomisation of an affectless discourse that takes no heed of the power-of-becoming that inheres in music.[11]