France’s near-revolution in May ’68 marked a breaking point, a moment when the idea of everyday life itself was up for reinvention. In its wake, a small but fiercely alive counterculture surged into motion, giving rise to an underground music scene that refused the conventions of Anglo-American rock orthodoxy.
Drawing from the fractured psychedelia of Soft Machine and Pink Floyd, the anarchic sprawl of Frank Zappa, the open language of free jazz, and the urgency of radical politics, they built something looser, stranger, and more exploratory. Improvisation replaced structure; disjunction became a feature, not a flaw. By the early 1970s, the arrival of the synthesizer only deepened the rupture, pushing this music further toward uncharted, future-facing terrain.
This new compilation, released in February from Australia’s The Roundtable, serves as the opening chapter in a series accompanying Synths, Sax & Situationists. Centered on the second wave of bands emerging around 1972–73, it captures a moment when psychedelic residue and jazz abstraction fused with the possibilities of new technology.
A subsequent volume will turn back to the immediate aftermath of May ’68, tracing the more overtly political groups that first ignited the scene.
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