In geological terms, Magma is the substance found deep beneath the crust of the earth or to quote the dictionary: ... molten material from within or beneath the world's crust from which igneous rock is formed. It suggests energy, brute and primeval. It can burst through the surface and burn away life, as we know it, in a mad flash of purification. Or then, living the existence of a cosmic monster deep inside the earth's womb, nourish its crust with endless vitality.
"I have always found the names of groups somewhat weak and unrelated to particular motivations. Magma is a very powerful and a little known matter of which stars, suns and entire galaxies are made of. Perhaps it is our only physical link with the Universe. So I decided to call the group MAGMA. We all come from there and nothing is more powerful than Magma, and since the musical idea was a powerful and grandiose one, I wanted the name to be up to it."
There are inside of us relationships that lie so deep we are hardly aware of them. Music, like all art, is a witness of man's predicaments and can perhaps best of all express the anguish of discovery that overcomes us at times.
"When I heard Coltrane for the first the I couldn't listen to anything else afterwards. Perhaps I was wrong. But there was no other music that mattered to me, and every time new Coltrane record was released it was like a source of new life. At the time I was not very happy, I had really great problems and my only link to life were my Mother and Coltrane. Coltrane was not just music - there was something else there as well: a spiritual search. I also felt and still feel that some musicians at the time, and even now, have not understood Coltrane. Many tried to copy him, for technical reasons, for the then 'fashionable' modal changes, etc., but without a real understanding of what he was saying. To me he was not just a sax player but also a man speaking, saying something. That's why none of his 'notes' were vulgar.
I guess it was a purely instinctive thing that made me like him and then love him. Every time something has affected me deeply, it's been instinctive. Every record of his, for instance, was penetrating my life; was the thing that made me want to live. At home I'd play along with his records with my brushes on the back of sleeves. It was, you might say, a lonely passion. Whenever I could, I used to hire a little demo studio and get in there with my Coltrane records and my drums. Three or four times I tried to go and jam at one or the other of the Paris jazz clubs, but the musicians were still playing 'standards' and even those who, a little bit later were trying to play his themes or copy his 'sound', only managed to vulgarise him.
So I preferred to play alone with the records. I couldn't play "jazz" anymore, particularly with the mentality of the French musicians; not one single one of them could help me to answer some of the things Coltrane asked. I was entirely on my own. At the end it became quite fantastic. When a new record came out, and often I didn't have the bread to buy it, I used to go to the record shops just to listen to it. While other people around me were listening to other music, I was in another world altogether; proud to be listening to Coltrane and to know what was really going on. And increaingly I felt there was more happening than just music. To me every note he played was something I cannot describe even today.
Anyway, I remember it was summer and Coltrane died and the guy who told me the news said it "just like that". I didn't believe it. Two years before, already, the same news had spread and then I was 16 and I rang up the radio station to find out if it was true or not. Nobody could tell me but finally I found out he hadn't died. I was so relieved. Then the "Village Vanguard Again" record came out. His playing was so fantastic, so far away that I felt this time he could, possibly, die. The day I bought the record I played it all night and again I felt afraid he was going to die. I went across the road to the local cafe and a guy said to me, "Hey, you know that friend of yours, Coltrane or something? Well he died last night in New York". I was shattered. I thought, I'll never find another life-source. So I got more and more depressed and started to drink and worse. I tried to forget that there was no link anymore to his existence. I didn't know what to do; I was lost. My dream had always been to play music like Coltrane, to perhaps one day be able to play with him.
Another Coltrane just seemed impossible, but I was almost hoping a miracle would occur - but nothing was happening in "jazz" and nothing has happened since, at least for me. Never had there been such communion as there was between Coltrane, Garrison, McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones at least in jazz. Some groups, call them rock or whatever, have it or come close to it. So, for three or four years I goofed all the way. Then, one day, I was on my third whiskey, I put it down and went home. I was in a terrible state, afraid of dying and went through horrible anguishes but decided never to booze again. I was going to try in all humility to go on playing and to pursue Coltrane's path. I knew that he was dead but I also knew that had he been alive he would have gone on playing and exploring spiritual accomplishment, and were he alive today, with so many more means available, and people's readiness for his music, he would have gone so far out, its unreal. But then he was very much alone. Today he would not be. I for one dedicated my life to follow along the path he mapped out.
My music is not like Coltrane's; its mine, but it is the same quest, the same course. If he were alive today he would perhaps like my music because I make it like he would, by feeling it in my heart, and I hope I am able to do it well enough. But being European, exposed to other musical sources, my situation is culturally different. My Grandfather, for instance was a gypsy violin player wearing golden earrings. I remember him well although he died when I was six. He was always surrounding us with music. Coltrane's music deeply moved me, because it wasn't 'time' music, 'temporal' music. He went well beyond jazz; music to "swing" to. He went into space, into infinity. By analysing my music I discovered it came from deep Polish and Baltic forests, from voodoo which I love like all exorcism and trance-music, from the grandiosity of some German music, Russian opera, "universal" music, tragic music. This is why my music is not like Coltrane's, but we are certainly soul mates."
MAGMA play recognizable music, but have rejected all known languages, like English (the pop-esperanto) or even French. Their language is Kobaļan. Which comes from Kobaļa, the imaginary planet where the new concepts will one day be able to flourish and where the new man, UNIWERĻA ZEKT, will find, we hope, greater energy and meaningfulness.
"I can't explain how Kobaļan came about. When I started to write on the piano, years ago, I used to sing along with the melodies and from deep down inside me, words came out, that didn't sound like anything that existed anywhere. Little by little it all began to make sense. French seemed too weak a sound and English wasn't my language, so why not invent one."
With the expansion of leisure and "leisure industries" it is important that popular music should evolve a greater sense of social action as much for the vast audience that it covers as for its own aesthetics, In the age of Prof. MacLuhan's "Global Village" we cannot just go on amusing or entertaining ourselves without due care for our spiritual, as well as physical, survival.
"We have nothing to lose on this earth because there is nothing to be gained from it. Since we find ourselves "launched" into life, the only thing we can lose, but in which we had no say whatsoever, doing nothing is also nothing. MAGMA is my entire life. If it fails I shall die. For me, personally, on this earth, there is after MAGMA, nothing."
MAGMA's music and attitudes spring from the awareness that the time for meaningful popular-artistic action has arrived. Its work is that of undertaking the research and application of a "now innocence", which, to quote French writer Raoul Vanageim "... is the lucid bringing about of a wipeout", even if it means facing moments of horrifying anguish. MAGMA are against a view of life which reduces every person to an impotent onlooker, his creative dignity repressed and his liberty curtailed, and where the imitative and the mediocre reign supreme. Tradition is not rejected as such, but there is a pressing need for invention, particularly with today's available media.
"This is why I cannot leave anything to chance with my music. I dedicate my life from now on so that it will be a contribution I can offer to people if they need it. Too many "musicians" play for themselves, for a few critics and promoters, not really caring for the people even when the people care for them. When people leave a MAGMA concert I would like them to think that they knew why they came: to listen and to have heard something that might help them in sorting out the mystery. MAGMA is not a "commercial" group. We didn't set out to please lower common denominators."