Street Confrontations, Made-up Languages and Gigs in Mental Facilities: French Lost Music Movement of 1968

The seismic impact that the month of May 1968 had on the France's culture has become widely recorded. The youth protests, which broke out at the Sorbonne prior to spreading around the nation, hastened the demise of the Gaullism regime, politicised France's philosophy, and produced a wave of radical movies.

Much fewer understood – outside France, at bare minimum – about how the transformative concepts of 1968 revealed their musical side in sound. An Australian musician and journalist, for instance, was aware of barely anything about France's non-mainstream rock when he stumbled upon a crate of vintage LPs, categorized "France's progressive rock" during a before Covid journey to Paris. He felt impressed.

Below the alternative … Christian Vander of the band in 1968.

There was the group, the large group producing compositions infected with a jazz legend groove and the orchestral pathos of the composer, all while performing in an created tongue called Kobaïan. Also present was another band, the electronic cosmic rock group created by the musician of the band. Another group included anti-police messages inside tracks, and Ame Son created melodic arrangements with explosions of instruments and rhythm and continuous spontaneous creations. "I never encountered thrill like this after finding German experimental music in the end of the eighties," states Thompson. "It constituted a authentically subterranean, rather than merely non-mainstream, culture."

This Brisbane-native artist, who experienced a degree of creative achievement in the mid-1980s with alternative ensemble Full Fathom Five, totally became enamored with those artists, resulting in further trips, long conversations and currently a publication.

Radical Origins

His discovery was that France's artistic revolution stemmed from a dissatisfaction with an previously globalised English-speaking status quo: art of the fifties and sixties in European Europe often were generic imitations of US or UK bands, like French singers or other groups, France's equivalents to Presley or the Rolling Stones. "They believed they had to sing in the language and appear similar to the Stones to be capable to make sound," Thompson says.

Further factors played into the intensity of the period. Before 1968, the Algerian war and the France's state's brutal stifling of dissent had politicised a cohort. An emerging type of France's rock performers were opposed to what they considered authoritarian police-state system and the established regime. They stood searching for innovative motivations, without US commercialized content.

Jazz Inspirations

They discovered it in US jazz. The legendary trumpeter was a frequent visitor in Paris for a long time in the fifties and sixties, and artists of the jazz group had sought refuge here from racial segregation and social restrictions in the America. Further inspirations were the saxophonist and Don Cherry, as in addition to the innovative edges of music, from Frank Zappa's his band, the group and the progressive band, to Captain Beefheart. This minimalist minimalism of the composer and the musician (the latter a Parisian resident in the 1960s) was a further influence.

The musician at the Belgian gathering in 1969.

One band, part of the groundbreaking psychedelic music bands of the French underground culture, was founded by the siblings Thierry and Fox Magal, whose parents brought them to the famous Blue Note venue on the street as youths. In the end of 60s, during playing jazz in bars like "The Sinful Cat" and journeying through India, the siblings encountered another artist and Christian Vander, who went on to create Magma. The movement commenced coalesce.

Artistic Innovation

"Bands including the group and the band had an direct impact, encouraging other individuals to form their own groups," explains the journalist. Vander's ensemble created an entire genre: a hybrid of experimental jazz, orchestral rock and neoclassical sound they called Zeuhl, a expression representing roughly "celestial power" in their invented language. It still attracts artists from around the continent and, particularly, the Asian nation.

Then came the street clashes, begun when students at the Sorbonne's suburban branch protested challenging a ban on integrated dormitory visits. Nearly each group referenced in the volume engaged in the protests. Various artists were creative learners at the art school on the Left Bank, where the collective produced the legendary May 68 posters, with messages such as La beauté est dans la rue ("Beauty is on the public spaces").

Student activist the figure addresses the Paris crowd after the removal of the university in May 1968.