Magma Live in Vienne, France

Very different and utterly brilliant, Magma is a group that was founded as the “vision of humanity’s spiritual and ecological future,” by Christian Vander back in 1969. A French classically-trained drummer, Vander sought to build the most creative force in world music with Magma, and he might very well have succeeded. Their first album, Kobaïa, set the tone, describing the mass exodus of people fleeing a doomed Earth. Known as Kobaïans, these refugees sing in their own language, which was created by Vander out of Slavic and Germanic elements, and they play a new form of complex prog rock, termed “Zeuhl.” 

But beyond genre, the music of this group contains all manner of reference points: jazz, classical, opera, hard rock, avant-garde … It is a gushing soup of truly free music, tied to stories that are equally free and expressive. Here, at this remarkable 2018 concert, they use up the hour slot with just two tracks, weaving first the epic, five-part tale “Ëmëhntëhtt-Ré,” which recounts the story of an ancient figure who lived before humankind, “Born at the heart of nebulas, fed on mineral glow, and riding crypts capped with a cosmic vault.” The second is “Ëhn Deïss,” known as one of Vander’s most powerful and enduring compositions. 

Sheer originality and expression … Vander once said about Magma that it: “had to be created, if not by me, then by someone else." Yet we might equally say that perhaps only Vander could have thought up this remarkable brain child.