SUNLOVE

If there can be only one video I could to share with you, it would be Jean-Jacques Lebel’s 1967 30-minute “Sun Love”. A crazy voodoo-level pagan surrealistic experience. Unfortunately, I was never able to find a digital copy. I was exposed to artist-activist Lebel in Centre Pompidou’s retrospective a couple of years back. And as you might have guessed, I became somewhat obsessive about it. When I shall get my hands on the footage, I will generatively machine learn the hell out of it! PM IF YOU HAVE A COPY. In the meantime please enjoy this rare footage of Soft Machine performing naked at the 1967 Sun Love happening in Cogolin, near st. Tropez, on the French Riviera.

“The Picasso part lasted an hour, that depended on the Soft Machine, and afterwards there were happenings, concerts… An American actor told us ‘come back to my place, I’ve got a swimming pool’, so we went and we created a happening which took the piss out of the faux-mystics, and we made a pseudo ritual to the rising sun, we took the piss out those people who were taking the piss out of the hippies, it was Sun Love…” (Lebel)

Happy 2020.