I take the reissue of A&M Records' 'Mekanïk Destruktïw Kommandöh' and 'Köhntarkösz' as the excuse for the following exegesis on Magma.
Magma was founded in France eleven years ago at a time when UK and US records completely dominated the French youth market and French groups all had to play the pop and blues based music that the foreign companies were selling. More extraordinary still, and hard for us to really comprehend, they had to sing in English.
It was in this climate that Magma began to develop their own music in France, a music that was essentially not American and not aimed at the commercial market.
For many years they were received with incomprehension or derision, often with actual violence. Soon they discovered that to be able to play with any frequency at all they would have to actively involve themselves in building an alternative network in their own country. Amateurs of music there were a-plenty all over France, but they needed a centre, a rock on which to build. Magma more than anyone else took on this role; much furthered by the organising genius of Giorgio Gomelsky, at that time their manager. In about four years, certainly by 1974, an independent European music had a foothold in France. French musicians learned to respect themselves.
As I have said, what was so important about Magma's music was that it did not concern itself with the fashionable foreign imports. It came mainly from a European compositional tradition - from Carl Orff, from Stravinsky, from eastern European folk music - and though their performing power came from rock and radical black jazz, the spirit, form and content of their "oeuvre" was unequivocally European.
Magma did not sing in English. Their main composer, Christian Vander, created a phonetic language (more like German than anything else) that was conceived as an integral part of his music. This was not so much a nationalistic innovation as an aesthetic one. Kobaïan, as the language was named, solved two problems for Vander: 1 How to avoid singing in English, and 2 (more importantly). How to use any text at all, that could match the power and suggestive vastness of the music - which was literally too dramatic for words.
It was in developing the dramatic in his music that Vander recognised a special quality inherent in rock, that electronic instruments have at their disposal a range of dynamics and frequencies that no orchestra can command. So when Vander took certain elements present in European "Art music" (particularly from Carl Orff), and introduced them into the rock vocabulary, he not only qualitatively advanced those elements in "Art music" (especially the dramatic ones) but also advanced the potential of rock music itself as a medium for serious cultural work.
Now opposed to collective work, its ability to work beyond Orchestra is doomed from the start as a hierarchical career structure whose relations are not personal or even ideological but simply commercial, an Orchestra's co-operation in playing is not a function of its relations as people but a conditioned response to impersonal marks on manuscript paper and "creative direction" of a conductor.
A group like Magma, on the other hand, can be a close-knit collective with commonly held aims - both musical and supra-musical. It can communicate with its audience on an existential as well as on a musical level. This audience becomes a living part of a new creative process, unbound by the old cultural accretions of "Art music". This audience experiences itself as a part of its own future.
In those days to attend a Magma concert was to go through a baptism of fire and it was precisely this ritualistic commitment - even fanaticism - which gave Magma the strength to do what they did and which made what they did decisive and compelling. It was impossible to ignore them because they transcended the rock commodity category and entered a world of ritual and community. And this was also a world of musical nationalism that rejected the culture of the UK and US. No wonder they were so influential: they opened the door to a "local" culture where before an alien culture had ruled.
As we have noted, Magma did not present their public with a nice simple musical commodity but rather with a social totality that included a shared struggle wrapped in a mystico-political ideology; essentially with a kind of religious participation. In this respect they were a bit like SUN RA and referred back to an older tradition in which the music was only a part of a greater social whole.
They adopted a Bon symbol as their emblem, which they always wore. They invented an entire mythology based around the planet Kobaïa. They dressed all in black. Their music was austere and highly disciplined, ecstatic and apocalyptic. They often harangued their audiences before, during or after a gig. Their main text, partially translated by Vander, described the purification of a wicked and warring humanity through willing self-sacrifice. "The Universe guides them into the celestial march - the one from which there is no return. And Immutable Fate now completes its work."
This "seriousness" alienated both the non-progressive and the politically "left" among their audiences - or at least gave them a severe moral headache. Were Magma fascist? Was it true that Christian had learned Hitler's speeches and sometimes declaimed them in Kobaïan at concerts? Rumour and speculation were rife and these as well as the black clothes, the discipline and the "spiritual radiance" cannot be divorced from their unquestionably progressive cultural position. But this is not the place to discuss such a complex question.
A Magma concert could be seen as a ritual of death - and it was all too easy to forget that the initiation it affected was rebirth: that Magma were actually dealing with awakening and catharsis and never with fatalism or despair.
Magma had the extraordinary and unique quality of not only using highly complex rhythms - they were the first rock group I ever heard using a 5:4 relation (where five equally spaced beats are played in the space of four) - but also enmeshing everything in clear, strong body rhythms, which bear the listener along with exhilarating ease. Often they employed the device (used by Stravinsky) of playing precise additive rhythms (5/8, 9/8, 7/8, 5/8 etc) against a straight e.g. (2/4) crotchet rhythm, so that a third, implied rhythm emerged alternately on and off the beat - a rhythm which carries the listener straight through all the "bar lines".
DynamicsThis is a form of musical expression, which is more appropriate to rock music (technologically) than to any other musical form - and yet it is hardly ever used.
I think it is true to say that no rock group has employed - and mastered - the use of dynamic modulation as Magma have. There is a continual mobility and sometimes even the effect of "waves" of sound which subtly overlap; different parts move from foreground to background and vice versa so that both timbre and implied rhythm perpetually shift. Again, especially with the suggested rhythms arising from these dynamic variations the less "conscious" body is rolled across the bars.
MelodyMelodically speaking Vander moves from rhythm-as-melody, where melody is a function of repeated rhythms or rhythms varying additively, to a romantic lyricism. The Cradle Song from 'Köhntarkösz' is a good example of the latter, simple, poignant and impossible to forget. This is in fact a quality omnipresent in Vander's compositions and is brought into sharp focus by the unique vocal styles of both Vander himself and Magma's main singer Klaus Blasquiz. Many of Vander's tunes are directly derived from, or have a strong affinity to, eastern European folk music melodies, and like them, are intended to be instinctively remembered and a pleasure to sing.
HarmonyI am not well qualified to deal with this in any detail. Magma always use ambiguity in harmony; still lines which create harmonic modulations, not ones which resolve but rather which always imply further forward motion. Very common is the "Devil's interval", the diminished 5th, the most ambiguous interval in tonal music (hence the interdict on its use in the Middle-Ages - hence too its extreme mobility and implication of imminent instability and change). This interval has another quality too and one much exploited by Vander: it seems untouchable, external, to exist independently of the keys. It is much used by Messiaen for instance for the Immutable, the Eternal and Fate. Often Vander creates the impression of continual ascent. A concrete example of this is to be found in 'Köhntarkösz'. Here the voices ascend the scale of D major while the basses descend in three uneven stages from C#, C, to E. Each time the voices reach the top of their scale: C#, they tie over to join the first note in the beginning of the next bass cycle. But at this point the scale cannot resolve while the basses are in E, so the scale has to continue to climb to its next note, which is D again and the beginning of another scale. Although it returns to the D an octave below, it gives the strong impression of an unresolved and irresolvable melody, perpetually climbing, set against a steady but tense bass.
So to these two records:
These two releases are the A&M records and from Magma's "classic" period.
'Mekanïk'(Third movement of Theusz Hamtaahk - The judgement of Humanity for all its cruelty,
its dishonesty, its uselessness, its vulgarity and its lack of humility. As
predicted by the prophet Nebëhr Gudahtt moved and inspired by the Spirit of
the Universe in its infinite wisdom.)
For the first time Christian built up one short piece (which first appeared in a seven-minute version on a Philips sampler in 1972) into a full scale, epic work. It is undoubtedly the biggest and most consistent work Vander ever achieved and I suppose his "master work" to date (though I prefer in some ways 'Tristan et Iseult', the Barclay record). Everything on 'Mekanïk' serves the music; there is nothing extraneous and no display of technique for its own sake.
'Mekanïk' has the confidence to proceed slowly and thoroughly (in common with certain Russian films) and doesn't concern itself with novelty. It keeps attention not through frequent changes but by a sheer, overwhelming vastness, which includes the listener; by delicate control of tension and development and occasionally by the perfect and apposite use of detail and subtlety. Special mention should go to guitarist Claude Olmos in this respect.
The record was made at the Manor in Oxfordshire and the Aquarium in Paris in 1973. The whole story of its travails cannot be gone into here but one thing is worth explaining. The whole of the first 16-track tape was mixed down and put back on to a new 16-track master - the other tracks on the new tape were then all filled up, especially in building the choirs. As a result some of the rhythm track is lower in the mix than was probably intended, but of course it was impossible to raise because it had already been mixed down.
'Köhntarkösz' (Entering the tomb of Ëmëhntëht-Rê)
Effectively this has three tracks though one is split into two parts and occupies two-thirds of the record. This is the title track and demonstrates a level of rhythmic and harmonic subtlety in Magma's music that they have not since equalled. Melody appears as a strong
element and yet is almost entirely absent in a conventional sense. There is
only rhythmic and harmonic tension; only implication, yet this creates its own
body, its own melody and its own ineluctable motion. The choirs are used to
particular and essential effect here.
As we noted in the context of dynamics so tempo too is grossly underused by rock music. This piece is an illustration of what can be done. As one of the most important groups of the decade Magma deserve your attention. The rest you must sort out for yourselves.