ROMANTIC WARRIORS II: ABOUT ROCK IN OPPOSITION

After the first RW documentary, the same warriors embarked on a riskier but more fascinating crusade, this time focalizing on the RIO movement, axing it story on the Once Upon A Time In Belgium project, which saw RIO kingpin Univers zero, Present and newcomer Aranis join forces for a mega 17-musos feast lasting about an hour at 2011 RIO- Festival in Carmaux in the mid-south of France. Yours truly was present at that yearly festivity, as is relatively often the case, but as usual chose to avoid camera attention.

The documentary presents a fairly chronological order of the foundations of the RIO movement in 78, starting with the major bands' previous works prior to the chart's signature. In some ways the spirit of the RIO movement's DIY attitude and labour showed the way for the modern prog realm to count only on itself to make things happen. Perhaps a bit strange (but not so much), is that the historical perspective starts with the French band Magma, who was never considered a RIO member. Of course, the documentary moves to UZ's Daniekl Denis' passage in the French band and the halcyon days of the band. As you'll easily guess, a consequent part of the next dozens of minutes are spent investigating Henry Cow and Wyatt, Samla, Etronfou and Stormy Six's respective works and history. Then moving on to the movement's second wave of admission in the circle with Bears, Zoyd, Aksak, Present and a few others, until we reach the modern era, to include Sleepytime Gorilla, Aranis, Yugen and others. The documentary does fail to speak about the USA side of things, first with The Muffins and then with the 5/Plague/Totemist galaxy of things.

On the interview side, we're of course seeing most of the familiar and unavoidable faces of then and today's scene, beit musicians, producers, festival organizers and label owners; plus a bunch of notable nobodies (minus yours truly, despite being a nobody as well) just giving the barren enthusiastic opinions or knowledge. So we get a fairly wide- encompassing spectrum of the RIO past and current scene, wide enough to foray in Zeuhl and Canterbury scenes as well. Should the RW crowd do another rockumentary, I'd guess that they'd investigate these two small genres that were born on their respective side of the Manche/Channel. As for this seconf instalment, I found it more interesting than its predecessor, despite my knowing a fair bit of what was presented. One of the main improvement I found on this second episode, is that there is a lot less communal self- satisfaction that I had detected in the first "chapter".