Street Battles, Created Tongues and Shows in Psychiatric Institutions: France's Forgotten Music Revolution of 1968

This seismic shock that the month of May 1968 exerted on the French culture was extensively chronicled. The youth protests, which erupted at the Sorbonne before expanding throughout the land, quickened the conclusion of the Gaullism government, radicalised French thinking, and produced a wave of radical films.

Far fewer is known – outside the country, at least – about how the radical ideas of 1968 expressed themselves musically in sound. One Australian musician and journalist, for one, was aware of little about France's underground music when he discovered a crate of classic LPs, categorized "France's experimental rock" during a pre-Covid journey to the city. He became impressed.

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

There existed Magma, the expanded ensemble making music infused with a jazz legend groove and the symphonic feeling of the composer, all while singing in an invented language known as the language. Additionally another band, the synth-dabbed experimental outfit established by the musician of Soft Machine. Another group included anti-police messages throughout compositions, and Ame Son produced melodic pieces with bursts of instruments and rhythm and flowing experiments. "I never experienced excitement comparable after discovering German experimental music in late 1980s," states Thompson. "It constituted a authentically hidden, instead of merely alternative, scene."

This Australian-born musician, who had a amount of artistic accomplishment in the 1980s with alternative ensemble Full Fathom Five, completely fell in love with those artists, causing further trips, extensive conversations and now a volume.

Transformative Roots

What he found was that France's musical revolution emerged from a discontent with an already worldwide anglophone establishment: art of the 1950s and sixties in European the continent often were uninspired carbon copies of American or English artists, including French singers or other groups, France's equivalents to Presley or the British band. "The perception was they needed to sing in the language and seem comparable to the Stones to be able to create art," the writer explains.

Other aspects contributed to the passion of the period. Before 1968, the North African conflict and the French government's severe repression of dissent had politicised a generation. Fresh artists of French rock artists were opposed to what they considered oppressive police-state apparatus and the established regime. They were looking for new motivations, free of American mainstream material.

Musical Influences

The answer came in African American jazz. Miles Davis had been a regular figure in the capital for years in the fifties and 60s, and musicians of the jazz group had sought refuge in France from discrimination and cultural restrictions in the America. Additional inspirations were the saxophonist and the musician, as well as the avant-garde fringes of rock, from Frank Zappa's his band, Soft Machine and the progressive band, to Captain Beefheart. This minimalist minimalism of the composer and Terry Riley (the latter a Parisian resident in the 1960s) was a further influence.

Frank Zappa at the Amougies event in 1969.

One band, among the pioneering mind-altering music bands of the French underground scene, was created by the siblings the Magal brothers, whose relatives brought them to the legendary jazz club establishment on Rue d'Artois as young adults. In the end of 60s, between playing music in venues like "The Sinful Cat" and journeying around India, the siblings met another artist and the future Magma founder, who went on to establish Magma. A scene began to coalesce.

Musical Transformation

"Groups such as Magma and Gong had an direct effect, encouraging additional artists to form their own groups," explains the writer. Vander's group created an complete genre: a combination of experimental jazz, symphonic rock and neoclassical music they christened the genre, a term signifying roughly "spiritual power" in their made-up dialect. It still unites artists from throughout the continent and, particularly, the Asian nation.

Subsequently occurred the street clashes, started following youths at the Sorbonne's suburban branch resisted opposing a prohibition on mixed-gender residential interaction. Nearly all artist referenced in the volume took part in the uprisings. Several musicians were art students at the institution on the Parisian district, where the people's workshop printed the iconic 1968 posters, with messages such as La beauté est dans la rue ("Creativity is on the streets").

Student leader the figure speaks to the Paris crowd after the clearing of the Sorbonne in the month of May 1968.