In March of 1978, a handful of European prog rock bands performed at a small music festival in London called Rock in Opposition. The event was conceived by the outsider British band Henry Cow, who had found kindred spirits in avant-prog outfits in countries like Sweden, Belgium, and France, and their slogan was, “The music the record companies don’t want you to hear.” For a couple years, RIO became a quasi-formal anti-establishment collective, and the arty Belgian avant-rock band Aksak Maboul joined its ranks as part of a second-wave expansion. At the time, Aksak Maboul were exploding their experimental ambitions, a charge spearheaded by co-founder Marc Hollander. The weird, tangled sophomore album they released in 1980, Un Peu De L’Âme Des Bandits, is just now receiving its first vinyl reissue on the same pivotal independent label it spawned nearly 40 years ago.
The songs on Bandits are the product of an ambitious, kooky recording session Hollander orchestrated in Switzerland. The album was released just three years after Aksak Maboul’s debut, and the sound is far more erratic and knotty, almost absurd in the way it juxtaposes genres and tiring in some of its contemporary classical and free jazz improv explorations. The first song, “Modern Lesson,” struts a plain Bo Diddley guitar riff across the track as grungy foundation and thrashes it with a barrage of nutty accompaniment: screechy, deranged vocals skitter in and out, a bassoon and plunky synth lend a momentary near-carnival effect, an early drum machine maintains some parallel timeline. None of the songs on the album sound alike, but they share this maximalism that flirts with cacophony but drudges up a groove if you give it a minute or two (or four). Sometimes, the accomplishments are more austere. The eerie synths and awkward gait of the tense “Alluvions” sound indebted to the cinematic classic of the Fantasia soundtrack until the song wobbles into a frantic half-manic jam.
Rarely do songs bleed into one another or follow logically; more often, neighboring tracks sound like they’ve cracked the album apart by standing so close together. When the opening thrashing guitar of “Inoculating Rabies” threatens a committed post-punk turn halfway into the album, a bassoon swoops in to perform an unexpected duet with a bass clarinet. Bandits is full of this dissonance as meta-commentary. “Geistige Nacht” sounds like sinister crime drama funk that snowballs off-kilter: a panicky bassoon solo (there’s a lot of bassoon here) sets the tone for the second half and then rattles further into a freewheeling jam. The percussion keeps the improv grounded with a shuffle; it feels like a final jigsaw piece that illuminates the rest of the sounds as the band feels around in the dark. Elsewhere, songs like “Palmiers En Pots,” a faithful tango, and “I Viaggi Formano La Gioventù,” a meandering Turkish raga, are capsules of Hollander’s tick for filtering traditional music from around the world through the baroque deconstructivism. (The tango was “written” by cutting and pasting, literally, lines of music from disparate traditional pieces into a Frankensteined whole; the music from “I Viaggi” was nabbed from a Turkish brochure.)
Bandits sounds of a piece but stitched together from track-length experiments. It has no regard for flow and a dissonant chaos at its heart, but its unpredictability never comes at the expense of exhilarating technicality. The reissue’s extras, a backstory booklet with a spare bonus CD that lays out the chronology of the band and tracks the meandering experimentation that led to Bandits, helps position the recording and understand its intent. But the simple victory is that Bandits has been unearthed for a new audience. From the brainy free jazz improvs to hysterical noise rock jams and sludgy grooves, you don’t need to learn the nuance of its history to peel back the zeal of its musicians, who seemed all along to be saying, “Hey, serious music can be silly too.”
