This page is my map of avant prog, also written avant-prog: the far edge of progressive rock, where rock bands borrowed from contemporary classical music, free jazz and folk, and where a small group of European bands decided in 1978 to organise outside the record industry. It starts with a single concert in London and ends up in Denver, Quebec City and Tokyo.

The short version

Rock in Opposition, usually shortened to RIO, began as a festival. On 12 March 1978 the English band Henry Cow brought four continental groups to the New London Theatre in London: Stormy Six from Italy, Samla Mammas Manna from Sweden, Univers Zero from Belgium and Etron Fou Leloublan from France. The slogan of the night was simple: this was the music the record companies did not want you to hear. Later that year the bands turned the festival into a small collective, and Art Bears, Art Zoyd and Aksak Maboul joined. The collective itself did not last beyond 1979, but the name stuck, and listeners and record distributors went on using RIO for a whole family of adventurous bands. On this site I use avant-prog for the wider family: progressive rock bands that lean towards the avant-garde, from the original RIO circle to the groups that followed its example in the 1980s and after.

A festival, a collective, a label

Henry Cow had formed at Cambridge University in 1968 around Fred Frith and Tim Hodgkinson, and had signed with Virgin Records in 1973. In October 1977 Virgin cancelled the contract. The band answered by building its own network. The London festival of March 1978 was paid for in part with a £1,000 grant from the Arts Council, and although it lost money, it was reported far beyond Britain. In December 1978 the bands met at the Sunrise studio in Kirchberg, in Switzerland, to give RIO a structure. Membership was kept small, and new groups were expected to meet three conditions: musical quality as judged by the collective, work outside the music business and a social commitment to rock.

There were never many members. Stormy Six organised the second festival in Milan, at the Teatro dell’Elfo, from 26 April to 1 May 1979, with all seven groups on the bill. Two more festivals followed, in Sweden and Belgium, but the disagreements about what RIO was for were never settled, and by the end of 1979 it had quietly come to an end. What survived was the infrastructure. Henry Cow’s drummer Chris Cutler had founded Recommended Records in 1978 as an independent label and distribution network for RIO and like-minded artists, and the label carried on the work after the collective had gone.

RIO was never one sound. The founding bands came from five countries and varied widely in style, and the German reference works list folk, jazz, chamber music and twentieth-century avant-garde music among the influences. The standard histories of progressive rock describe avant-prog as a subgenre that grew in the late 1970s out of two strands, RIO and the Canterbury scene, and name Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart among the artists who opened the way. Since 2007 the name has had a second life in Carmaux, France, where a Rock in Opposition festival was launched by Roger Trigaux of Present and Michel Besset, with Chris Cutler’s approval.

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The bands in this guide

Five of the nine bands here were part of the original RIO collective: Univers Zero and Etron Fou Leloublan were there in London in March 1978, while Art Bears, Art Zoyd and Aksak Maboul were admitted later that year. Art Bears grew directly out of Henry Cow. The band formed in January 1978, while Henry Cow was recording its fifth album: Frith, Cutler and singer Dagmar Krause wanted to make songs, the rest of the group preferred wordless pieces, and the songs came out under the new name. AllMusic describes the result as bold, challenging and idiosyncratic music. Univers Zero, led by drummer Daniel Denis, took its name in 1974 and built its early albums on acoustic instruments such as oboe, spinet and harmonium. Aksak Maboul was started in Belgium in 1977 by Marc Hollander and Vincent Kenis, and Hollander also toured with Art Bears in 1979.

The two French bands came from different corners of the country’s underground. Etron Fou, founded in 1973, played its first concert opening for Magma, and as Etron Fou Leloublan, with drummer Guigou Chenevier and bassist Ferdinand Richard, it lasted until 1986. Art Zoyd dates back to 1969 in Valenciennes; with Thierry Zaboitzeff and composer Gérard Hourbette, it later turned to new scores for silent films, among them Murnau’s “Nosferatu” and Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis”. When Univers Zero split up in 1987, Daniel Denis joined Art Zoyd.

The other four bands carried the idea into later decades. Thinking Plague was formed in Denver in 1982 by Mike Johnson and Bob Drake; the band was never part of the movement, but it was strongly influenced by Henry Cow and Art Bears, and its third album came out on Recommended Records. Miriodor was founded in Quebec City in 1980 by François Émond and Pascal Globensky and has released most of its albums on the American label Cuneiform. Ruins began in Tokyo in 1985 as the project of drummer Tatsuya Yoshida, who writes and sings in an invented language, so the band is a vocal one even if no listener will recognise the words. Guapo, a British group formed in 1994 by drummer Dave Smith and guitarist Matt Thompson, played the first Carmaux festival in 2007 alongside Magma and Present.

I tell the story of the 1978 festival and its aftermath in my article What Is Rock in Opposition?, and the American label that kept many of these bands in print has its own page in my piece on Cuneiform Records: The Avant-Garde Catalogue.

Elsewhere on Prog Atlas

Three of the five founding bands live under other scenes on this site. Henry Cow, in my British section, started the whole thing; AllMusic’s Myles Boisen called its sound so mercurial and daring that it found few imitators. Stormy Six, formed in Milan in 1966, played the London festival and hosted the Milan one a year later. Samla Mammas Manna, from Uppsala, was the Swedish founding member. Present was formed in 1979 by guitarist Roger Trigaux, a founding member of Univers Zero who left after its second album, and it is Trigaux who later relaunched the festival in Carmaux. Magma crosses this story more than once: Etron Fou opened for it in 1973, and it played the Carmaux festival more than once. That is also why, on my Zeuhl page, Univers Zero and Present appear as distant relatives of zeuhl. Tatsuya Yoshida of Ruins leads Kōenji Hyakkei, his tribute to Magma’s music. Frank Zappa is named among the pioneers of avant-prog, and Faust and Gong both played the revived festival in Carmaux.

Where to start

I would start at the source with Henry Cow’s “Western Culture” (1979), the wordless final album the band released on its own Broadcast label after the split, and then turn to “Hopes and Fears” (1978), the Art Bears debut, which combines songs from Henry Cow’s January 1978 sessions with new Art Bears recordings, the rest of Henry Cow credited as guests. From Belgium, “1313” (1977), first issued simply as “Univers Zero”, is the debut of the band’s acoustic period, and “Heresie” (1979) is the last album with Roger Trigaux before he left to form Present. “Un Peu de l’Âme des Bandits” (1980) was recorded in Switzerland with Chris Cutler on drums and Fred Frith on guitars and bass, and Pitchfork called it a knotty experiment. Stormy Six’s “Macchina Maccheronica” (1980) has Henry Cow’s Georgie Born among its guests. For the American branch, Thinking Plague’s “In This Life” (1989) was the first American-made CD on Recommended Records, with Fred Frith guesting on one track.

Related scenes

The Canterbury bands that shaped avant-prog are in The Canterbury Scene, and the closest musical cousin of several bands here is Zeuhl. The jazz side of the story continues in Jazz Rock & Fusion, and the heavier experimental end of rock in Experimental & Post-Metal. For bands that are harder to file, try Eclectic Prog.

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