Ian Thompson

Synths Sax & Situationists

published in The Wire No.500, London, 2025

Excerpt

In the forward to Ian Thompson’s Synths, Sax & Situationists, Jean Jacques Birgé (of experimental rock/theatre event-producing entity Un Drame Musical Instante) writes about how, as a teenager during May ’68, he was inspired and energized to engage with wild sounds, radical performances and social spectacles which captured the explosive nexus of student social protest and aesthetic arts deconstruction: “Rock, which is mostly a collective project, brought electricity but jazz, which promotes individuals, made us improvise.” It’s a fascinating view that encapsulates the book’s embrace of the wide gamut of personnel and projects created in the aftermath of May’68 across France. I thought Rock to be more an ego-oriented enterprise, and jazz to engage in group input/output, but this testifies to the wonderful open-endedness of musical production no matter its form or genre. Pertinent to the book, May ’68 is clearly centred, but it is also allowed to be less a forced determinant and more a conceptual atmosphere soaked up by eager and hungry youths of all stripes seeking to express themselves to the world in artistic acts of protest, subversion and incorporation.

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Text © Philip Brophy. Image © Round Table Books.