On a mid-November night last year, fans gathered for a rare show by search-engine impaired French underground trio France, a band who unite heads across Europe, but many of whom can’t tell you exactly how many songs this band has. The answer is just one, but it exists in multitudes.
It was the third on a short tour, the only type of tour they will countenance, and a rare trip to the UK, and after nights in Bristol and Todmorden, they capped it off with a bigger show at Rich Mix. The soundsystem boosted the sound, but with the room’s bigger capacity and the division between stage and audience, it lost the immediacy of the band’s preferred way of playing: no PA, just amps, in the round in a circle of audience members; your latest tQ subscriber release, Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts, captures just that, recorded live by our friends at The state51 Conspiracy during an additional intimate show at their East London HQ.
“I don’t like PA’s, you know, they flatten everything that’s going on,” says the band’s bass player, Jérémie Sauvage. “And to me, with the drum kit acoustic and then the amplifiers – [the sound] spreads out in a circle. I think a six metre radius is ideal. If you can handle these six metre with this sound, that’s the best six metres. And that’s enough,” he explains, comparing it to sitting around the heat from a fire. “You can fit in a lot of people; just enough people. The stadium stuff, that’s just the complete opposite.”
France formed 20 years ago as a trio of art students in Valence, originally doing electronics and circuit bending. They are a trio of Sauvage on bass, Yann Gourdon on electrified hurdy-gurdy, and a drummer, usually Mathieu Tilly, but for these shows Cyril Bondi.
France are at the hub of a sprawling cosmos of projects, collectives and labels, each with their own clutch of projects. Sauvage runs the label Standard In-Fi, and plays in Omertà, Tanz Mein Herz and other assemblages. Gourdon has played hurdy-gurdy since he was a child, and came to electrify it after studying under Valentin Clastrier. He plays in Toad, and various duos and groups connected to the La Nòvia collective, including with Jericho, La Baracande, and in various assemblages with musicians including Jacques Puech, Guilhem Lacroux, Basile Brémaud and others. A number of drummers came and went before Tilly settled into the ranks. Their original drummer, Thomas Rakotondrainibe, played the first gig and Sauvage credits him with establishing the “Neu!-like motorik” that sets the pace of France’s music, and which they returned to in 2013 after trying on an array of different motoriks. After Rakotondrainibe the late Guillaume Borde played drums, then Antoine Hadjioannou of Aluk Todolo. “Then Mathieu arrived in 2006 and we knew we’d found the right guy. He has played 98 per cent of all gigs,” says Sauvage. Occasionally he’s not available, so others step in, for this tour Cyril Bondi of La Tène, Cyril Cyril and Insub Orchestra, but also Alexis Degrenier of La Tène, Romain Simon or Antez.
France are the sons of Tony Conrad and Faust’s Beyond The Dream Syndicate, which stands as an acknowledged influence and benevolent father to their rotational torque with its looping gait, where beginning and end are arbitrary moments in time. Cult Japanese band Les Rallizes Dénudés are also a strong influence – particularly on Sauvage – for their music’s ageless repeating basslines, and for the re-occurrence of the same songs across decades of live shows. “I really enjoyed the fact that they sounded different when they played the same songs over and over,” he says of Les Rallizes. “That’s where we get our continuum: in the fact that we continued to play. I don’t think Tony Conrad and Faust were interested in making that happen as a band.”
Having started out playing electronics, France laid down a palette that they stuck to: that motorik rhythm section of a simple rooted bassline and clomping drums, atop which Gourdon excites a reel and rides like lightning, at the same time as anchoring his flights with the gurdy’s drone. “It’s something you don’t have to think about,” Sauvage says of his bass playing. “It’s a zone, and you’re really not thinking at all. The hand is in your ears, or is blended, and then you try to listen as much as possible to what the others are doing, especially to Yann…
“The ground rules were laid down from the get-go and the fun resides in building and perpetrating the music step by step, and through the experience of doing it rather than projecting and theorising on it,” he explains.
In France the room becomes a fourth player. This used to be a more unruly element, when they played in tunnels and other unlikely – sometimes outdoor – spaces in the group’s early days. “Playing outside of the usual venues is always a treat for us,” says Sauvage. “Confronting an unusual architecture; a natural landscape, always brings out the best emotions… We did a lot of shows and events in crazy sounding, unexpected places with our own vision.”
The energy from the crowd also plays into each show’s version of their song, the mood of the day; the journey to the venue; the drink. The State51 show was particularly wild in energy and excess. Bandmembers swigged warm gin from the bottle and Gourdon’s hurdy-gurdy kept losing bits as he lurched around the edges of the round, with audience members sheepishly handing back handles and whatever else had popped off. Sauvage laughs when I mention the gin: “The drinking, it kind of makes you stop thinking a bit, you know? You just do what’s at hand. And that’s a good space to be in when you’re doing this sort of music, because you still have to play in front of people; you’re somewhere else. It’s good to get to that place.”
This loop, the circle, is central to understanding France. In their ideal setup, as it was at State51, the round is the loop is the music, the crowd forming their own barrier, the band sloshing around the space – screaming exhortations coming from Yann’s electrified gurdy and the eternal chug of the bass and drums. It might not seem like it, but there is a delicate balance being maintained here: live shows but not too many; particular sound setup that doesn’t push one thing too far: a song that stays the same but is always different.
France exist in two states: as utterly predictable in the structure of the music, but totally unpredictable in performance. This garners different reactions in different places. A show was ended because someone fell full-force into the drumkit; a punch was thrown when someone tossed a drink at a show in Marseille. I ask Sauvage if he has a favourite gig, or any memorable ones. “It always evolves,” he says. “It’s been groovier lately because getting together and having more of a party vibe is important to us now – that social aspect… With France, three or four gigs is already quite something – we like to be able to live that moment, and you can’t do that for too long, you know?
“It’s ever slightly changing… our own points of views of the band evolve, and the world around us changes. These moving contexts bring out new meanings; new experiences, while doing the ‘same thing’,” says Sauvage. “We rarely talk about any of this between ourselves. Interviews are the only occasion for me to hear what Mathieu and Yann have to say about music or the band – this amuses me very much.”
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