In this country the new wave is acting under pressure - time seems to be short and the screws are on - and it feels that it has to break with the past and with "culture". This certainly gives it its urgency and the "sense of reality" which constitutes its validity for its audience - but it also cuts it off from the very means of realising its own self aims: from the essential mine of all human learning and experience which is embodied in culture-as-a-whole. Partial and dismembered, the outlook and practice of our new wave thus falls easy prey to commercialisation and self-defeat, hence its relative cultural sterility.
As we would expect, therefore, the new wave in France is far more concerned with fashion and surface phenomena than with existence. In fact their closest approach to the alien and mechanical is through a formal, rather "elegant" school of synthesiser music. Some few French "punks" may ape our antics, but their hearts are hardly in it, I think.
In France, side by side with the imported new wave and their own electronic fringe, is a still flourishing sector of mainstream "progressive" music, which grew up around Magma in the late 60s. This "school" is especially characterised by two main qualities: 1. The use of European sources and styles (notably the musical lexica of Bartok, Stravinsky, Orff, etc); 2. The use of apocalyptic subject matter and an emotionally intense presentation.
Art Zoyd belong loosely to this school, though they are in no way derivative or imitative. Their line-up tells the first part of their story: violin, cello/bass, piano, trumpet, non-jazz saxophone and guitar - no drums. The whole is almost an electric chamber ensemble. But they do not play or approach their music like a "classical" chamber group, nor do they treat their instruments merely as acoustic instruments writ large, but have a clear approach to and understanding of them as electric instruments. This quality is hard to quantify exactly: electrification gives a power, dynamic range and tonal potential that acoustic instruments do not possess - a kind of attack and fullness that is unique to them. Also, electric instruments and the special qualities associated with them still belong properly to the generation which grew up with rock music ethos - in this context, while Art Zoyd certainly do use the harmonies and sonorities of "classical" music, they proceed from an ensemble style of rock music, which as we have said is crucially to do with an attitude, an alignment, an ethic - and also perhaps with a particular approach to rhythm and to repetition. This is "contemporary" music, it is also "rock music" - its precise strength is that both worlds could claim it.
'Génération Sans Futur' is Art Zoyd's third record (the first two were: 'ART ZOYD III' and 'Musique pour l'Odyssée'). From the evidence of this record they are still developing and improving; they have retained the extraordinary urgency and power they had before (do not be misled by their lack of a drummer - it accentuates rather than diminishes their attack, for their music is, by virtue of the group's extraordinary articulation, very "percussive"). But now they also have a broader, more lyrical, less tense component in their music which both deepens and heightens their emotional expressiveness and poignancy, lending a perspective to their work largely absent before.
Listening to Art Zoyd is stimulating, revealing and stirring. They explore their instruments within the unique form they are developing with subtlety and intelligence. For all the "cultural" elements in their music, their emotive power and expressivity is every bit as charged and vital as the best of the new wave - and rather more balanced. Here is a reminder that there are other ways than our own rather drastic "kill-or-cure" approach, that there is plenty to be grown from the older, more "cultural" traditions of Europe before we abandon them in the hectic race for the "original" - or worse, try and build, a new musical edifice on the shifting hostile sands of commerce.
It takes a culture with a remnant of faith in its ability to survive and in the propriety of its survival to try to build critically on the old and to have the sense of time and space to follow this through. Here is a product of such culture. If you think it's worth preparing in case we live past the day after tomorrow, then this record, its title notwithstanding, is one well worth listening to.