With the appearance of L'oeil au centre de l'oeil, La STPO—La Société des Timides à la Parade des Oiseaux—reaffirms its status as one of French experimental music’s best-kept secrets. Emerging from the fertile artistic ground of 1980s Rennes and now approaching four decades of activity, La STPO has cultivated a distinctive sound rooted in a collision of dadaism, surrealism, and avant-rock traditions. The band’s approach is more akin to constructing mental theatre than composing conventional rock songs: fragments of imagery, warped poetic lines, and abrupt shifts in rhythm and timbre suggest the logic of dreams rather than linear storytelling.
In L'oeil au centre de l'oeil, structural concision and instrumental diversity reign supreme; brief but densely orchestrated pieces are woven from electric guitars, xylophones, brass, woodwinds, and odd percussion, drawing on the group’s history of shifting membership and collaborative elasticity. The current lineup—anchored by Pascal Godjikian, Patrice Babin, JimB, Christophe Gautheur, and Benoît Delaune—continues to work with a palette that includes everything from metallic percussion to balafon, with wildly inventive vocal deliveries that blur the lines between music and theatre. The album’s textures move restlessly from burlesque cityscapes to intimate chamber abstractions, never lingering long enough to settle but always precise in their construction.
What listeners encounter in L'oeil au centre de l'oeil is a sense of perpetual motion, where recurring eruptions of contrasts are harnessed with rigorous intention, and even the most chaotic elements are meticulously curated. Echoes of Etron Fou Leloublan, Albert Marcoeur, and Rock In Opposition’s broader legacy animate the album’s backbone, as do traces of This Heat, The Residents, and King Crimson, all filtered through La STPO’s prism of sharp theatricality and “dadaized” rock. The band’s music has always been pictorial, often inspired directly by visual art—paintings by Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, and Erró have triggered compositional “explosions,” shaping tracks as if they were canvases erupting with color and form.
Far from settling into retroactive comfort, L'oeil au centre de l'oeil bristles with the anxiety of discovery: structures stretch and contract, vocals morph from whispered incantations to full-throated exclamations, and tension mounts only to dissipate in unexpected directions. Rather than idolizing any particular school, the group’s sound is genuinely in opposition—original, irreverent, and ceaselessly curious about the outer limits of musical narration. In this release, listeners are invited not only to witness the parade, but to step inside it, surrendering to a landscape whose contours are never quite fixed.
L'oeil au centre de l'oeil leaves a lasting impression as a bold statement from a band allergic to genre orthodoxy and unafraid of innovation’s inherent instability. This is not music for passive consumption, but for active engagement, rewarding close listening with an ever-changing tapestry of surrealist sound and dream logic. The album is both a celebration and a challenge—an invitation to explore the untamed territories mapped out by one of experimental rock’s most singular ensembles.
