I should probably create a boilerplate for what I'm about to say, given that I've said it to one degree or another in the past three posts of this series: 1981 was not a particularly notable year for progressive rock.
As before, this is partially because a lot of the classic '70s bands had either disbanded (this year, none other than Yes kicks the bucket, albeit temporarily) or moved on to other sounds, like pop (Rush[1] comes out with the all-timer Moving Pictures, for example, and if you've heard one Rush song on mainstream rock radio, it's almost certainly "Tom Sawyer") or some other unclassifiable direction (King Crimson's Discipline isn't really prog in the classical sense so much as it is experimental new wave, while as always, who knows what Frank Zappa is doing on something like You Are What You Is). It's also partially because there just wasn't a ton of young creative energy surrounding the genre in 1981, though by this time, you're starting to see a little bit of the shape of prog to come with some new bands forming—1981 sees the formation of Queensrÿche, for example, who would go on to take the vanguard of progressive metal in the '80s, while Marillion and Twelfth Night, who would both become pivotal to neo-prog, had already been active for a few years. But none of these bands had yet recorded anything close to their definitive work, nor had they caught on in any meaningful way with listeners, which yet again leaves the broader direction of progressive rock meandering.
So as with 1980, I'm using my 1981 post as a way to fill in some of gaps that I left in continental European prog while I mainly focused on British prog in the '70s. Last time, it was Germany's krautrock/kosmische musik. This time: zeuhl!
I imagine that there is a not insubstantial subset of readers[2] whose first reaction to the previous sentence is, "What the hell is zeuhl?", and unless you are French, that would be an understandable response. Unlike krautrock, none of the bands associated with zeuhl have ever really broken out into the broader English-speaking mainstream, which makes it a somewhat obscure corner of the prog world, even today when most of recent music history rests at the fingertips of anyone with a Spotify account. And then I chose to cover Dün in this post, which makes this extra fun, because that means I get to talk about an obscure piece of an already obscure corner of a somewhat niche genre. Blogging is a wonderful thing.
So anyway, what the hell is zeuhl? Hold on. This will take a minute.
So while the UK was busy being the international face of progressive rock, a lot of the rest of Europe was having its own take on the genre: prog had a strong pull in Italy, for example, and I've already talked about Germany's prog last time. Each country's national scene had its own quirks, but France's takes the cake. See, in France there's this band called Magma; other French prog bands exist, but Magma is far and away the most famous and also the one that's relevant to zeuhl. Magma was started by a drummer named Christian Vander. Like a lot of first-wave prog bands, the band started coming together in 1967 (though they wouldn't be fully active until 1969) at the height of the counter-cultural psychedelia movement. Unlike a lot of prog bands of the era, though, the band's genesis wasn't Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band or an acid trip[3]; rather, it was the sudden death of John Coltrane in July of that year. Vander was apparently so distraught by Coltrane's death that it sent him on a spiral that caused him to quit the band he was in at the time and travel abroad. When he returned to France older and wiser in 1969, he put together what would become Magma in, as Wikipedia puts it, "an attempt to fill the void" left by Coltrane.
The Coltrane influence is pretty apparent on Magma's recordings, which share the spiritual/cosmic fervor of the last few years of Coltrane's output, as well as having obvious compositional similarities in the sense that they are jazzy and unpredictable and built around improvisation. It doesn't really sound like Coltrane, though; being a prog band, Magma had some orchestral ambitions, with a lot of brass and woodwind and even female choirs[4] in their music, and also, being a prog band, Magma also built their discography around this really wild sci-fi concept in which each album was a continuation of a story involving a group of humans who escape a dying Earth to go live on Kobaïa (a planet of Vander's invention). Presumably, at least; I honestly can't understand a word of the lyrics, and it's not because I don't know French. No, it's because most of the time, Magma isn't singing in any human language as we know it but rather in Kobaïan, a language that Vander invented to be the spoken tongue on the planet Kobaïa, so you get song titles like "Rïah Sahïltaahk" and "Kreühn Köhrmahn Ïss Dëh Hündin," and it's anyone's guess what those mean, because they aren't translated into French (or English) in the liner notes. Apparently, Kobaïan is a language "spoken from the heart," without any real semantic meaning, which as far as I can tell means, "made up as we went along [5]," so I guess that makes translation difficult, but we do have at least one word translated for us: zeuhl, which means "celestial."
In case you haven't noticed, this is pretty goofy, even for prog.
Magma, perhaps tongue-in-cheekedly—it's really hard to tell how much of this is meant to be taken seriously—called the music that they made "zeuhl music," and as kooky as a lot of this stuff is on paper, in fairness to them we probably did need a special term for this music, because it is unlike anything else I have ever heard. Philosophically, the expansion of rock instrumentation to orchestral grandeur with the purpose of realizing some big sci-fi concept fits right in with the general prog ethos, but sonically, this is something entirely its own. The mix of jazz improvisation, the guitar wails, the choral chants, the conlang thing—it accumulates into something pretty stunning on an audio level. That contrast between the ludicrously whimsical stuff on the textual level and transcendent, serious stuff on the musical level feels like the key to the particular heady, hair-brained alchemy Magma achieve, like the comedy rock undergirded by virtuosic instrumentation that Frank Zappa traffics in swallowed whole by a group of space aliens and taken to the stars. When I'm listening to it, I find myself often caught up in its sweep while simultaneously being pretty amused that something so goofy not only exists but also has sweep in the first place. It's otherworldly and completely itself, so it's no surprise that they basically ended up defining French prog in the long run and practically inventing a whole subgenre as other French bands started to mimic their sound.
So anyway, that's zeuhl: a bunch of French bands paying tribute to a Coltrane tribute gone wild.
Magma doesn't have any 1981 albums, but their footprint has a strong showing that year, because while 1981 may have been a weak year for prog in general, it's a pretty strong year for zeuhl music. You have Eskaton's 4 Visions, for example, as well as Eider Stellaire's self-titled debut, and that's only a couple from an overall pretty full offering—a nice reminder that the focus on British prog you usually see from English-speaking dorks like me elides some pretty great music from the rest of the world, and just because the British movement was in decline doesn't mean that the rest of the world's prog was.
At any rate, the zeuhl album I've chosen for 1981 is Eros, the only record ever released by the zeuhl band Dün, and in the spirit of zeuhl's often potent mix between great music and ludicrous concepts, I've mostly picked Dün because in addition to making pretty solid music, they are whimsical and amusing to the max.
Dün begin in 1976 as a Mahavishnu Orchestra cover band called Vegetaline Boufiol, and I would just like to begin this by highlighting the sort of ludicrous and surprising fact that a world exists where the demand for a Mahavishnu Orchestra cover band would be high enough for one to actually materialize. Google Translate isn't returning anything for "Vegetaline Boufiol," which kind of crushes my hopes of this band having some ludicrous vegetable-adjacent name in French, but don't worry, we get to more ludicrousness soon enough. By 1978, the band had changed its name from Vegetaline Boufiol to Kan-Daar, and by this time, they had accumulated quite a cadre of musicians playing instruments ranging from the traditional guitar and drums to relatively atypical things like flute[6]. I guess the vaguely orientalist leanings of that name didn't quite sit well with the band, so they soon changed their name again. Apparently guitarist Jean Geeraerts and flutist Pascal Vandenbulcke were big fans of the novel Dune, so they renamed the band... Dune. Then I guess they decided that that was maybe too on-the-nose, so they made the final change and started calling their band Dün, because nothing disguises your sci-fi dorkdom like an umlaut. They must not have been too insecure about their fandom, though, because two of the four tracks on Eros have Dune-inspired titles: "Arrakis" and "L'épice" (French for "spice"). I love the unbridled frivolity of all this; it's so transparently the product of a bunch of nerdy dudes just hanging out and enjoying each other's company—so silly but so pure, and there's something kind of sweet about the fact that the band clearly never wanted to be anything more than that. Dün eventually opened for Magma at a local festival, and, probably as a result of that connection, they were invited to join Henry Cow's Rock in Opposition movement[7], but they never did get around to joining—"due to neglect and laziness," according to the liner notes of the 2012 reissue of Eros[8]. Ah, Dün. Just bros hanging with bros, ya know?
This ethos ran basically throughout everything the band did. Perhaps most notably and entertainingly, Dün was totally down with the bros just straight-up inventing their own instruments and debuting them onstage. To wit: Vandenbulcke, in addition to playing the flute, also was proficient in an instrument called the gruyèrophone, which he had created himself. If the sheer delightfulness of this is not readily apparent, let me add that this instrument was otherwise known as the "swisscheesophone," and involved, as Vandenbulcke himself described it, "a wind instrument belonging to the hunting horn family, with a tube mouthpiece and a square-shaped bell into which small bits of Swiss cheese are introduced. The technique is not unlike that of a bagpipe. When the player is tired of blowing the instrument, the small holes in the Swiss cheese then burst, taking over from the performer and allowing him to catch his breath." It seems uncharacteristically empathetic of Swiss cheese to know when a musician is tired of blowing, and I'm a little foggy on the mechanics of the whole operation, and sadly, as wonderful a place as the internet can be for this kind of delirious absurdity, it is not wonderful enough to have a clip of someone playing a swisscheesophone that I can find[9]. The sweet sounds of the swisscheesophone also never made it onto any of the band's studio recordings, and I don't think any live recordings of the band exist (can you imagine this band having the wherewithal, either financial or motivational, to make a live recording?), which means that the sands of time have tragically robbed the modern world from experiencing the dulcet tones of the swisscheesophone[10].
But at any rate, I guess I should probably get around to talking about the studio recordings themselves. Unlike Magma, the Dün bros seemed more interested in chillaxin' and jammin' with the boys than in writing lyrics, so they don't have any lyrics, Kobaïan or otherwise, which is fine: Eros's four tracks ("L'épice," "Arrakis," "Bitonio," and "Eros") are all hard-nosed experimental prog whose effect would probably have been disrupted by zeuhl's usual silliness, especially since I can only imagine what kinds of lyrics would have formed from the band responsible for the swisshcheesophone. In fact, the music on Eros is shockingly serious and technical, not just for an album that was halfway inspired by Dune but also for a band as seemingly intent on goofing off as Dün was. For as much time as I've spent in this post talking about the goofy context to Eros, you probably wouldn't find much of the actual music goofy at all if you didn't know all the culture surrounding the album. Each track plays with a foreboding, pulsing intensity built from the complex interplay of Vandenbulcke's flute, Geeraerts's guitar, and Bruno Sabathe's piano/synth keyboards. Sometimes this takes the form of these instruments trading solos (as they do in the opener, "L'épice"), and other times they pile on top of one another in a clashing cachophony (as in the climax of the closing title track); always, the music is driven forward relentlessly by the swirling dual percussion of Phillippe Portejoie's drums and Alain Termolle's inventive and entrancing... something—I don't always know what Termolle is banging on (the liner notes cite xylophone, vibraphone, and "percussion"[11]), but his beats in particular are mysterious and exquisite. The whole record just gels in this off-kilter but kind of tremendous way.
Turns out these swiss-cheese-blowing boys had some chops; Eros is a really good prog album.
Sadly, Dün never completed another record. Eros had already been a shoestring effort. Like a lot of essentially hobbyist, local-band scenesters, Dün self-financed Eros[12], which resulted in an extremely limited pressing of 1000 copies of the album that the band would sell themselves at shows[13]. The band continued to play live shows for the next couple years, but after a few lineup changes, they disbanded in 1983. Soon after, Vanenbulcke and Geeraerts created a Latin jazz group called Nevrose Spirituals (which seems like a weird direction for these guys, but okay) that lasted a short time before Geeraerts, apparently the most ambitious of the Dün bunch, left to attend the Berklee College of Music, and the new band fall apart. Then there was a brief Dün reunion in 1992 coinciding with a '70s/'80s revival concert in Dün's hometown of Nantes, but that's the last time that the band has ever played. And that was pretty much that.
The only other thing to note is that in a sort of small-scale Velvet-Underground turn, those 1000 copies of Eros became objects of minor cult fascination for record collectors and prog fans, which eventually led to the 2012 CD reissue/remaster that I bought. Aside from the zeuhl connection, this is basically why I wanted to cover Eros; the world of prog is dominated by your Genesises and King Crimsons and Jethro Tulls (and later by your Dream Theaters and Porcupine Trees), all of which still have significant radio play, some sort of current incarnation still performing, and/or at least a significant enough legacy that they stay at the forefront of the (admittedly niche) discourse surrounding prog. The ethos of progressive rock is one of size and grandeur; these bands wanted to be impossible to forget, and as such, compared to a genre like, for example, indie rock (which thrives off obscure corners and cult followings[14]), it's relatively rare in prog to have these obscure mythologies of The Greatest Band You've Never Heard Of, who played Swiss cheese instruments and whose only album was a self-financed LP with only 1000 copies in existence. So I thought it would be fun to explore one of prog's few examples of this.
Actually, this is kind of the mythology of zeuhl as a whole; at least in the English-speaking world (and certainly in the United States), zeuhl is a hyper-underground phenomenon, the province of record collectors with a penchant for the avant-garde, Prog Archives contributors, and pretty much nobody else. The zeuhl albums I bought for this post were certainly the hardest (and most expensive) to acquire of any of the albums I've gotten in this series, and they all had to be ordered from European sellers, even the albums by Magma (far and away the most popular zeuhl band). It's an interesting thing to see obscurity within progressive rock, but if you want it, zeuhl is for you. Plus, there's some pretty great music at the end of the scavenger hunt.
Not bad for a Mahavishnu Orchestra tribute making a tribute to a Coltrane tribute in the form of a Frank Herbert tribute.
See everyone in 1982!
1] I would be remiss not to mourn Neil Peart passing here. We lost probably the single greatest rock drummer of all time, and from what I've seen, he seemed like a pretty cool guy in general.
2] The two readers who even still read this series, that is.
3] Well, I suppose I can't confirm that acid wasn't involved. But it's not typically the reason given.
4] Making Magma one of the only major prog bands I know of to extensively use female musicians (even though most of the core members were male). All rock music is, to a degree, male-dominated, but I can't figure out why prog is such a sausage fest even within rock music. Theories welcome, readers.
5] As fans of Icelandic post-rock may recognize, this is a similar tactic that Sigur Rós employed when inventing their Hopelandic language, though Magma's music is considerably less self-serious and baroque than Sigur Rós's.
6] Though I suppose that in the scope of prog, this one's not atypical at all, given the shadow of Jethro Tull.
7] Sort of the "We demand to be taken seriously" of progressive rock, in which Henry Cow and a bunch of other under-appreciated but innovative bands in progressive rock's avant-garde wing tried to garner a larger following in opposition to what Henry Cow saw as the increasingly corporatized and bland music occupying a lot of labels in the UK. Their slogan was, "The music the record companies don't want you to hear." The messaging was a little melodramatic and more than a little self-aggrandizing—it turns out that "the music the record companies don't want you to hear" was also "the music most people don't want to hear." They weren't really successful, clearly, which is a shame, because there was a lot of interesting music in that lineup.
8] Which is where most of my knowledge of Dün comes from, admittedly.
9] You can, however, get an image of a swisscheesophone on a necktie for $28.75 (plus shipping).
10] I have no idea if Pascal Vandenbulcke is still alive, but if he is, can the internet please make it its collective priority to find this man and record him playing his swisscheesophone? I am but a humble blogger, and I have only this one request.
11] What are the odds that he's drumming on blocks of Swiss cheese?
12] Typical of Dün's proto-slacker ethos, the liner notes mention that "there was never any time spent looking for a record company."
13] Again, the liner notes specify that the Dün dudes did this "without looking for a national or even regional distribution." Given prog's usual outsized ambitions, there's something so refreshing about a band who clearly had no ambitions at all.
14] And actually, Dün's fame-eschewing slacker attitude and DIY production fit pretty nicely with, say, '90s indie rock.
(1) I'm still reading this series! (2) It's cool to learn that Sigur Ros had predecessors in the "sing in a made up language" vein. I consider it sometimes because I like singing but I think my lyrics kind of suck haha. It's a handy workaround.
ReplyDelete(1) Yay! I'm glad someone's still around! (2) Yeah, I was surprised about the whole made-up language part of zeuhl when I was first into it. You should go for it, dude! Make up a language!
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