Marc Blanc and Patrick Fontaine met as schoolboys at the Lycée Rodin in Paris in 1967, an ordinary beginning for a band whose next chapter involved moving in with an English guitarist twice their age on a Spanish island. That guitarist was Daevid Allen, freshly out of Soft Machine and calling his loose backing outfit Bananamoon; Blanc and Fontaine spent the back half of 1968 and the start of 1969 living communally with him in Deìa, watching an older, stranger musician work without a map.
They took the lesson home. Back in Paris in June 1969, the pair recruited flautist François Garrel and guitarist Bernard Lavialle and called the new group Ame Son. Within months they were on the bill at Amougies, the sprawling Belgian festival that put Pink Floyd, Soft Machine and the Pretty Things on the same stages as the emerging French underground, and by Blanc's own account it worked: a first festival slot that doubled as a test, and one that played to critics and a crowd who hadn't heard of them an hour before.
What they made next was Catalyse, cut for BYG's Actuel imprint under producers Jean Georgakarakos and Jean-Luc Young, with Pierre Lattès as executive producer. The instrumental tracks were recorded in a handful of takes in London; the vocals, sung in French, went on afterwards back in Paris, which gives the record its slightly displaced feeling — a very English kind of psychedelic sprawl with a very French voice laid over the top, closer in spirit to Gong's early looseness than to anything more disciplined. Reviewers at the time and since have called it one of the earliest true progressive rock records to come out of France, the production rough in places but the ambition unmistakable. Garrel's flute and Lavialle's guitar do most of the talking across long instrumental stretches built, in Blanc's own description, from interchangeable parts that could be reassembled in a different order on any given night.
It didn't last. Ame Son split in June 1971, less than two years after forming, for reasons its own members have called mundane rather than dramatic: relationships that ran their course, money that never arrived, management that was never really there to arrange it. No feud, no manifesto, just four musicians drifting apart once the novelty of being early wore off.
Catalyse remains the clearest evidence of what they sounded like at full stretch: a record that treats the gap between free jazz and freak-out rock as a place to live in, rather than a line to cross on the way somewhere else.
