These
were the original sleeve notes for the Vertigo release of 'M.D.K.
MAGMA - solitary and proud. An ideal architecture, of metal and glass, keeper of the fire. A still landscape under a frozen sun, like a pale unblinking eye. At the very beginning, the silence of waiting. And then, coming from afar and further still, the echo of a heavy, threatening, throbbing pulsation shaking the earth, the knees and the hands. It's time to choose: to stay or to run.
It is certainly not a slight surprise to suddenly stumble upon these builders clad in black laying out their own setting and commanding their own crashing din. Fear often accompanies the unheard and, for a long moment, one is utterly stunned. Not however, by the delightfully stealthy fear provoked by masks, but - like lightning hitting your very chest - the fear of a naked face met in the middle of nowhere, a mask that turns into a second skin.
And cut out on this face, a mouth, speaking an unknown or forgotten language... and you turn away. Then, dark and gaping the mouth screams... and you run. But who knows if this apparition is not perhaps telling the truth? Lost, you escape to the comforts of habits and lies, as always living great passions by ... proxy.
MAGMA. There is the intelligence restraining impulsiveness, subjugating passions and establishing the reign of rigour and sacrilege - asking for a mental effort. True, one can find other satisfactions in music: self-sufficient beauty, a message of some kind, momentary violence, switched off with the spotlights, dreaming into oblivion until the next record on the juke-box.
But Magma is no juke-box, no dream-merchant. It is beauty, message, violence and dreamy but above all it is a formidable instrument of a no less formidable will. Magma wants, and says "We Want" where others mumble "We Would Like To", doubtless the reason for the many absurd legends surrounding the group. Magma wants to reach the goal it has set itself: that of building and offering a truly popular music without compromise. A plough tied to a star. Refusing the adult/retarded child relationship with their audience, which makes a tired hooker of most popular music of the day, the people of Magma have once and for all mapped-out their way from which there is no possible deviation.
To pretend, as some do, that Magma's music is only 'cerebral' is another mistake, common and understandable when coming from those who for years are used to purchasing their thrills from the "supermarkets" of art, without capital A, where everything is neatly packaged, ordered and above all, without surprises. Magma's impulses, controlled as they may appear to be, are otherwise sincere, otherwise profound. Prisoners of the strange edifice of metal and glass, one can hear them shouting from behind the metal with such strength and endurance that one begins to hate the too perfect walls that retain the flood. Perhaps the time has come to understand that liberation does not depend upon the artist, who only shows the way, but upon ourselves, and that these faultless walls are put up inside our heads, while outside Magma is' knocking relentlessly like hundreds of hammers stealing our heart-beats and bending them, pitiless, to their own rhythm. Sounds, like predatory birds, glide across the sky of voices, are born and die, again and again, like a choir of angels, but not quite like them. Too much tension. Lancinating insistence. This music vibrates, cracks and screams.
MAGMA. Intelligence pitted against intelligence. Leaning on the edge of this shining blade, the paw grabs the passer-by and carries him off conscious and stable. Frost-coloured lucidity, like cocaine. No easy seduction here, and too bad if the whores sell-out at the box-office. Just a terrible, inexorable progression. A perfect glass-spiral endlessly unfolding and inside it a sea of burning lava. Who wants to break the glass and get burned?
This journey isn't easy. The music demands of the listener as much as it gives him, more than just a physical presence and some vague "wailings". It requires attention, and, a new spirit. Beyond its formal beauty, it offers more respect for its listeners than any other; a fierce refusal of being "levelled-out" from beneath.
Communicating on higher levels and sticking to it in the quagmire of "show-biz" could mean being taken, by some at least, as a sort of "mutant".
Of course, playing Magma's game is risking giving up one's illusions and to see the wind of the music take away the thousand pieces of blurred images, vague warmth and hazy sensations which ordinary pop music usually brings out in you by means of single records and other assorted devices (anyway, its charm and its aim also).
Here, opening the door to anguish, many questions are asked, provoked by images of cruel precision, two green eyes transfixed, a metallic vessel with sharp, cutting fins, a steel paw, an hallucinated guide, or a whole people crushed and damned.
Those who have followed Magma's path, know what these musicians express with their music: the inescapable refusal, like violent vomiting, of a world - not just a given society, but the whole world, where nothing is worth living any more because there isn't a solitary spark of purity left.
A world of ashes full of stray, vagrant ash(en) souls. And so the men in black go amongst these shadows, brandishing their fists and shouting their warning and their faith in a better place.
Mythical? Kobaļa is perhaps, after all, not so far away. It is deep inside each of us, waiting, frozen and solitary. To undertake the journey to this planet one has to start by opening one's eyes, to see oneself in one's entirety, stripped of the masks and of make-up. Magma is there, waiting. A metal mirror.