Magma / Christian Vander

In which I explain why this bizarre French rock'n'roll project is important to this blog

The living legend, Christian Vander (at Roadburn Festival, Tilburg, April 2017)

What follows is a rather long post that condenses some key thoughts I shared with my internet pal Yeerk P. on a rather long podcast episode I recently appeared on about not only Magma but the French animated film La Planète sauvage AKA Fantastic Planet (1973). Check it out if you’re into podcasts.

Here on Steam Calliope Scherzos, I occasionally dedicate some attention to specific cultural works I consider especially valuable, not just for understanding my own intellectual interests and views, but because they’re valuable as works of art in themselves. And although it feels strange to say, the French progressive rock band Magma and its leader (and sole consistent member) Christian Vander have been among the biggest influences on my thinking — not just about music but aesthetics in general. This may perhaps be surprising, considering that they don’t have a particularly clear philosophy or viewpoint that they’ve articulated over the years, and I’m not even that much into progressive rock on the whole. In fact, let me start with a few prefatory remarks on prog rock before getting into Magma.

Most rock music in general is kinda dumb, and it often falters when it tries to strike an intellectual pose. Attempts at intellectualism have often been a problem in particular with progressive rock music, and it has even tarnished what would I would consider otherwise excellent bands, such as Henry Cow, Art Bears, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, and others. Even in Frank Zappa’s music, which he tries so hard to enliven with humor, there’s a distance and an iciness that pervades his whole mentality that prevents me from fully embracing his work on an emotional level. At least when cheesy heavy metal bands like Iron Maiden make songs about literature, there’s an innocence there; a genuine excitement about the material they’re presenting. I could say the same for some of the lyrically dumber prog bands, though their music isn’t as good. But for the most part, the Anglophone prog rock legacy is one of constipated emotions and excessive self-awareness, and this ultimately doesn’t work so well for “rock’n’roll” music, a style invented by black musicians who gave it a genre name that (one mustn’t forget!) is a reference to both a) the movement one makes when attending a church service and feeling its spiritual intensity from within, and also b) the act of having sex with a lady. Despite his hatred for organized religion, Lemmy from Motörhead still understood all of this better than most progressive rock bands. So on the one hand, I can appreciate the gesture of trying to punch above one’s weight, but on the other hand, some of rock music’s best lyrical material has had little to say beyond noticing that girls, cars, fighting, and drinking are cool — a sentiment I agree with and see little reason to defend or explicate at length.

But nonetheless, great artists can show up in any idiom, through any medium, and at any time — always without warning. And when a work of art is great, one doesn’t need to qualify one’s praise. So it’s worth meditating a bit on what Magma have accomplished that so few other bands have.

I. Musical Style

I’ll begin by trying to describe the music. I’ve seen people describe Magma as “a combination between John Coltrane and Carl Orff,” and this really isn’t right at all. There are legitimate reasons for this claim, though. The first is that Christian Vander idolized John Coltrane from a young age. Even when he was living in dire poverty and didn’t have electricity in his house, he begged his neighbors to let him run an extension cord into their electric outlet so that he could listen to John Coltrane records on his turntable. When Coltrane died, Vander was so emotionally distraught that he traveled to Italy and went on a self-destructive bender, and finally in a moment of clarity it occurred to him that he needs to go back to France and form what he would later call Magma. In a sense, Vander dedicated his whole music career (if not life) to Coltrane and has repeatedly credited him with being the sole reason he didn’t commit suicide at various dark moments. So it makes sense to assume that Vander’s music should sound like Coltrane, his primary musical influence.

But this really wouldn’t be correct. You can hear distant echoes of Coltrane’s musical ideas in Magma — probably the most notable is Vander’s occasional screaming vocals, which sound quite a bit like Coltrane’s dissonant saxophone wailing during his late, “free” period — and Vander’s side project Offering features much more obvious influence from Coltrane’s less abrasive music. But Vander himself has always insisted that Coltrane was more generally inspirational to him than directly influential on his composing style, and I see no reason to second-guess this statement.

As for Carl Orff, there’s some truth to this statement if we reduce Orff’s entire musical output to just “O Fortuna” from his Carmina Burana cantata, which is fine, because that’s the only Orff piece people listen to anyway. But “O Fortuna” mostly just sounds like what Vander composed in his Mëkanïk Dëstruktïẁ Kömmandöh (or MDK) album from 1973, which is also his most Germanic-sounding work. Vander himself actually commented on the similarities in an interview, saying,

In 1972, I was introduced to "Carmina Burana by Carl Orff". There I discovered similarities in the melodies I composed at the time, for example, MDK, composed in 1971. I was surprised and I even thought, "this is exactly the orchestration and formation I would like to have in Magma." Unfortunately, we lack the means, as is still the case today.

I can’t agree that the whole Carmina Burana sounds like Magma, but certain melodies, sure. In any case, the similarities appear to be accidental (unless Vander specifically reworked the composition to sound like Orff), and anyhow little of what Vander wrote afterwards resembles Orff, at least not to my ears.

Magma started off sounding pretty jazzy, and given that the project began in 1969, the same year Miles Davis released In A Silent Way — and their first album came out in 1970, the same year Davis released Bitches Brew — you could call them a pioneering jazz fusion band. On their first album, they also at times sound like Frank Zappa. But their commitment to sounding like jazz didn’t last long, and this actually prompted a few personnel changes (importantly, the keyboardist Faton Cahen and the quite good alto saxophonist Yochk’O Seffer both departed to form their own band, Zao, which sounds a lot like early Magma). On their third album, MDK, they truly established themselves as having a different sound from everyone else, and this sound would go on to inspire an entire progressive rock subgenre known as “Zeuhl.”

What made Magma revolutionary from the very beginning was Vander’s approach to rhythm. Though he plays piano and composes all of the music with it, he’s primarily a drummer, and from the start he was playing with a degree of rhythmic complexity altogether absent from any other rock’n’roll at the time. For this reason, Magma is respected highly by educated drummers, and Vander is considered justifiably to be one of the best drummers in the entire history of rock music. Before Magma really found a unique style for itself, rhythm was always its secret weapon.

Anyway, it took a few albums for Magma to establish its sound, but by the mid-1970s it had added a few more unique qualities to the music — things that one simply didn’t hear in rock at the time. You could whittle their sound down to the following elements:

• Church-like female choir singing set against Vander’s more operatic-sounding vocals (he’s also the lead singer in addition to being the drummer)

• Loose, wandering, narrative-building song structures reminiscent of what you hear in late-romantic symphonic tone poems

• Strong use of repetition, with vocals often resembling mantras or mystical incantations, often with surprising transitions from one group of repeating bars to another

• Electric pianos and throbbing electric bass, although the instrument choice has varied over the years. The bass sound intensified especially when Jannick Top entered the band in 1973, and although they’ve used guitar before in various lineups, Magma is not a guitar-forward band.

• Dream-like, exotic harmonies that often bear more resemblance to French late-romantic/early-modern music than to German romantic music (people often stress the German-ness of Magma due to the vocals, which I’ll discuss in a moment)

• Willingness to experiment with modality rather than always adhering to standard tonal chord progressions

• Blurred lines between improvisation and composition — a solo, for instance, might sound improvised at first, but then you hear a musical accompaniment come in and start copying it note-for-note

• Musical segments that invoke American gospel music and occasionally early rhythm & blues — clear appreciation for black religious sensibility

• Strong rhythmic complexity, though this is not always instantly recognizable to an untrained ear — we’re dealing with irregularity, not zany time signatures or jarring transitions that draw unnecessary attention to themselves. Much like alcohol content with a good wine, rhythmic complexity is best when it’s somewhat hidden.

A bit more should perhaps be said about the last point. Vander is widely reputed among progressive rock and jazz fans to be something of a drum prodigy; he’s extremely talented and technically sophisticated. And it’s also true that when you think of rock albums made by superstar musicians who excel on one instrument, like Joe Satriani or Steve Vai, you’re not necessarily going to think so fondly of their music from a compositional standpoint. The solos showcase mind-blowing musical pyrotechnics, but the actual compositions are often forgettable.

Vander avoids this problem by not worrying about what the drums will be doing when he composes, only figuring them out later once the piece has been written. Occasionally, this results in sparse, metrically precise playing that almost feel like an act of walking a tightrope. Additionally, every piece is typically reassessed following the experience of performing it live, sometimes multiple times, to the point that actual concert performances play a huge role in the band’s compositional process. As every composition grows more refined, the aim is always the same: to create a total artistic effect that reflects the originary flash of inspiration that spawned it — an effect in which every element of the piece interacts appropriately with the other, so that nothing stands out or takes unwarranted precedence.

Now, having given this description, I realize that one obviously can’t make sense of it without hearing the actual music. And admittedly, when I first heard the music, it took several listens for me at the tender age of sixteen to understand what Vander was attempting to achieve. My first album of theirs was BBC 1974 Londres, a live recording of both “Theusz Hamtaahk” and “Köhntarkösz,” two rather daunting compositions, especially for a first-timer. In order to grasp what was going on, I had to persist and develop an ear for it. I’m not even entirely sure what compelled me to keep trying. I suppose I just had some sense that there was depth to it.

II. The Kobaïan Language

One (quite good) blog primer on Magma that I found made the point that French rock music hasn’t been particularly successful internationally, and the French language may be a reason why. So when Magma debuted as a band in 1969, Christian Vander solved the problem in some sense by making up his own language. This language was called Kobaïan, and in the far-reaching science fiction saga that Vander created, it’s the language of the Kobaïans, an alien race who have reached a state of enlightenment that humans can only hope to attain.

Magma very quickly achieved underground success in France and wound up influencing a great deal of other musical acts both there and abroad. Some include Univers Zero, Present, Archaïa, Shub Niggurath, Dün, Eskaton, Eider Stellaire, Ruins, Koenjihyakkei, Bondage Fruit, Rialzu, Kultivator, Corima, Zwoyld, and more (and this doesn’t even include the many similar-sounding projects from former members, like the aforementioned Zao). And with I believe the sole exception of Eskaton, these bands do not sing in any spoken language; in fact, quite a few are instrumental-only. So was Magma’s rejection of the French tongue the key to their success? Perhaps it helped, but then again, plenty of people know of Serge Gainsbourg’s music today, so it’s not as though French is necessarily such a great audience repellant (although the British market did have its biases during prog rock’s heyday). But there’s something more at stake in the fact that Vander invented a language, and I’d like to discuss it at length here, since it provides a useful point of departure in understanding how the band works conceptually.

The key to appreciating Kobaïan is that it’s not a real language with a worked-out syntax and arrangement of morphemes, constructed in a vacuum with the purpose of being mastered by cosmopolitan linguists and grammar nerds, much like Esperanto or even Klingon. It sounds like some sort of mixture of German and Russian, and on paper, nearly all of the vowels have umlauts over them — not because they convey anything phonologically, but simply because they look cool. Kobaïan is much closer to the kind of improvisatory scatting you’ll find in early jazz records than any spoken language you’ve heard of, and yet it also has reached some degree of lexical consistency with certain words over time, as if by accident. Dedicated fans of Magma have created a Kobaïan glossary, and they take it quite seriously. They’re not wrong to do so.

The point is that if it’s truly to be taken as a “language,” it’s a language that started from the heart rather than the abstract mind. And yet, for all its emotiveness, there’s no reason to believe that people couldn’t take it up, tinker with it, and work out a dedicated grammar structure and expansive lexicon for it if they wanted to, in the same way that pidgin languages can become creoles. As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, starting in the Romantic period, a number of philosophers (many of them Scotsmen) became infatuated with the question of how mankind acquired language for the first time, and they concluded that language started with the desire to express the passions rather than logical postulations. Language, essentially, was not a computing tool but rather a way of communicating feelings, and thus it began through poetry and song rather than straightforward prose. In the medieval trivium, you’ve got three disciplines: grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Grammar, for these Romantics, was originally closer to rhetoric than logic.

So in Christian Vander’s Kobaïan language, you’ve got a nice demonstration of this notion at play. Vander doesn’t come up with the lyrics before or after the rest of the music; rather, they come to him alongside the music, and they never take such precedence over everything that the music should bend to their will. Vander does affix meaning to the words later on, and he comes up with a more fully-developed concept for what the music is about after it’s done (I’ll discuss the lyrical themes shortly), but as he has explained in interviews, he felt that all extant languages could not adequately convey the emotions he wanted to portray, and thus he had to invent his own language to do the job. The non-discursive sounds for both music and lyrics come before the meanings of each individual word and phrase.

Kobaïan also sometimes features words that already exist and have their own significance in other traditions. In K.A. (2004), for instance, a choir repeatedly chants “Allëhlüïa” toward the end of the composition, and this apparently means something quite different in Kobaïan than what “Hallelujah” means in the Biblical Hebrew. One might dismiss that as a one-off coincidence, but then, in Zëss (2019), which Vander originally composed in the 1970s, there’s a chanting about something called “Ïëzüsz Krïstüsz,” which just so happens to sound like Jesus Christus, the Greek rendering of Christ’s name. But no one ever claims that Magma is a Christian band — Ïëzüsz Krïstüsz apparently means something different.

The philosophical implication seems to be that some words, by sheer virtue of their phonemic configuration, simply take on a universal kind of profundity regardless of the context in which they’re uttered. And if so, this is actually quite an old idea in various schools of Platonic-Oriental esotericism. The Lutheran mystic Jakob Böhme (1575-1624) called it Natursprache, and it’s the idea that there’s a universally meaningful language just waiting to be discovered through the correct spiritual orientation, and when it’s found, every word achieves its proper place and indicates its referent not in a conventional but rather in an ontologically motivated fashion — so that, in other words, if we were all to achieve the proper state of grace and someone said the true, divine word for “cat,” everyone would instantly visualize the picture of a cat, whether they’ve been taught this language or not. You can see hints of this idea in the American southern protestant tradition, when Christians feel themselves touched by the spirit of God and start speaking “in tongues,” often while convulsing on the ground. So, one senses traces of this notion of a Natursprache in Kobaïan and the way it’s expressed lyrically.

Since Vander uses his own made-up language, he is automatically protected by the parasitic effect that lyrics and pre-determined language-driven concepts can often have on music. Everyone has heard at least one song in which the lyrics prove so forceful in their insistence that they distract from the music and even spoil it altogether. Magma never runs into this problem. But unlike many of the bands they influenced (and other bands who independently opt for constructed-language lyrics), they still come up with translations for some passages, give the words meaning, and even affix a loose, elliptically-expressed concept onto nearly all the albums.

Vander in the 70s

III. The Kobaïan Mythos

Thus, each album contributes a chapter to a vast, grandiose space opera about the Kobaïan race, the human race, the Ork race, great mystical figures like the Egyptian pharaoh Ëmëhntëhtt-Ré, the prophet Nëbëhr Gudahtt, the Universal Super-Man Kreuhn Köhrmann, someone named Thösz (we never actually learn who this guy is), and so on. But because the meaning of each album is never really predetermined and Vander focuses on the music itself as his north star, the manner in which his great space opera is told can be quite convoluted.

For instance, after Magma’s first two albums, their self-titled (1970) and 1001° Centigrades (1971), they put out their most famous album to date, Mëkanïk Dëstruktïẁ Kömmandöh (1973), and on that album, the liner notes indicate that it’s the third installment of the Theusz Hamtaahk trilogy. Now, you might be thinking, “Oh, OK, those first two albums were the first two installments of this trilogy,” but you’d be wrong. It was the third installment of a trilogy in which the first two parts were yet to be released, and up to this day, the second part has never officially come out via studio recording (only live versions exist). This kind of chronological screwiness is common in Magma.

But although it’s certainly cryptic, this approach has the advantage of prompting the fans to participate in the construction of the band’s mythology. The effect of how Magma tells its story is of making the entire discography seem like a record of archaeological findings as opposed to the slow development of a straightforward narrative. Once an album comes out, fans look for as many clues as possible — such as partial translations in the liner notes, statements in the notes about what the album is meant to be, statements from Christian Vander in interviews, etc. — and then debate amongst themselves about where the album fits into the Kobaïan chronology and what it’s meant to depict. Some of the fan theories are conjectural, but some of them are fortified with pretty good arguments, and most of the time there’s a good sense of which album is doing what, though the details are sparser with some albums than others.

As for what the stories themselves are about, I don’t want to spend too long discussing them — there are two good sources here (a very good article) and here (also helpful, but you’ll have to excuse the horrible pronunciation of everything — I got so irritated by it that I wound up choosing auto-generated subtitles and simply guessed at what the garbled text meant). But there’s the quickest synopsis I can give. The entire Kobaïan saga consist of a few different story arcs, and I’ll lay them out as they occur in order, story-wise.

• The Köhntarkösz trilogy - this consists of Köhntarkösz Anteria (2004), Köhntarkösz (1974), and Ëmëhntëhtt-Ré (2009). The story is essentially about a guy named Köhntarkösz who explores an ancient Egyptian tomb, discovers the spirit of an ancient pharaoh named Ëmëhntëhtt-Ré who tells him that he once had a vision to save the world, but he was killed before it could come to fruition, so now he haunts this tomb. He then fuses himself with Köhntarkösz, making him into a prophet of some kind. The end of Köhntarkösz (1974) reveals a prophecy in which there will be a great future war with the Ork race.

• The Kobaïa Story Arc - this was told in Magma’s first two albums, the self-titled (1970) and 1001° Centigrades (1971). In this story, the planet Earth is in an advanced state of decay, so some guys escape to a planet called Kobaïa, where they meet an advanced race called the Kobaïans. They bring a few of them back to Earth to hopefully enlighten the humans, but instead the humans imprison them. Just as they’re about to put the Kobaïans to death, the chief representatives of Kobaïa threaten to blow up the Earth with some sort of advanced death ray, and then the Earthlings release the Kobaïans.

• The Theusz Hamtaahk trilogy - as mentioned before, the first part of this trilogy was never recorded in studio, so it consists of Ẁurdah Ïtah (1974), and then Mëkanïk Dëstruktïẁ Kömmandöh (1973). The storyline here is that after rejecting the wisdom of the Kobaïans, the humans engage in an incredibly destructive war (we’re not sure with whom, or why), and this brings the Earth to an extremely advanced state of devastation. Finally, a guy called Nëbëhr Gudahtt shows up, and he’s a follower of the teachings of the now-deceased Köhntarkösz. Gudahtt prophesies the coming of the Kreühn Köhrmahn, the Perfect Man who will lead Earth to a state of supreme enlightenment. The Earthlings then follow the prophecy of Gudahtt, and the Kreühn Köhrmahn arrives, who leads the humans to kill themselves somehow, either through the achievement of sublime ego-death, or literally by killing themselves in a state of spiritual transcendence. I’m inclined to believe it’s the former, but it’s not altogether clear.

• The Ork War - Üdü Ẁüdü (1976) and Attahk (1978). For these two albums, the plot has pretty much broken down, but they seem to be about the Ork race, and a war they have with... someone. Maybe the Kobaïans. These two albums are the funkiest by far, and the most reminiscent of black gospel music and R&B. They are also highly cryptic in what they’re trying to portray — as far as I can tell, the Ork race is neither good nor evil, and they engage in some kind of ritual dance to worship the sun. It isn’t clear why a war has broken out, or what the nature of it is, and musically, the majority of both albums is fairly relaxed, which leads me to believe that they’re meant to portray the lifestyle and cultural mores of the Orks rather than depict them in combat. However, between the two albums, the masterpiece occurs at the end of Üdü Ẁüdü, and it is pretty martial. It’s a 17-minute song called “De Futura,” and it’s highly bass-driven, danceable, and yet also pretty apocalyptic. The notes describe the song like so:

  The people of Ork surround us, but we can't see them. These people are a type of being whose relation to machines is like that which machines have to us. Only a voyage through time enables us to see these beings. De Futura is the story of this voyage through time, a voyage which shows us how to stop the illusory movement of passing time which prevents us from seeing. This voyage is a magical and enchanting one - of course, this is on the condition that one really wished to live this adventure, to persevere in it and to let it carry one away. Behind the apparent harshness of this music, all is silence.

• Reunification of the Universe. Zëss (2019). This album is almost certainly the last chapter in the Kobaïan mythos, and Christian Vander resisted recording it for decades even though he composed it in the 70s — at one point he insisted that it would have to be five hours long to be recorded properly. Here is how Vander describes it:

  In the story that “Zëss” is about, at this moment a stage has been reached in which everyone has approximately the same level of understanding of the universe. For the finale, the masters have chosen a huge stadium somewhere in the universe, in which they stage a theatrical performance of the last day or night. The “master of language” who then speaks is at the same level of knowledge as the one who listens to him. It’s just a game, a theatrical idea.

• There are also some albums that appear to contribute something to the Kobaïan canon, but no one is sure how. These include Félicité Thösz (2012), Šlaǧ Tanƶ (2015), and Kartëhl (2022).

Now, personally, I don’t believe that one has to follow any of this to enjoy the music, and most Magma fans I know don’t bother to get too wrapped up in the storyline. But one fairly certain observation that can be gleaned from the story, taken on the whole, is that it suggests some kind of Platonic-Oriental metaphysical scheme that you’ll repeatedly encounter in various texts from western esotericism. All the signs are there:

• With the story of the pharaoh Ëmëhntëhtt-Ré, there’s the same fascination with the Egyptian mysteries that starts with the Renaissance reception of Hermes Trismegistus (chiefly through Giordano Bruno) and continues all the way down to Rudolf Steiner in the 20th century.

• When the humans eliminate themselves at the end of MDK, it suggests a process of ego-destruction and subsequent apotheosis akin to an initiation into the higher mysteries.

• The figure of Kreühn Köhrmahn vaguely recalls the idea of the perfect man found in Alain de Lille’s Anticlaudianus (13th century — and note that medieval Christianity, particularly in Alain’s school of Chartres, was heavily Platonic).

• When Vander claims that time is an illusion in the notes for “De Futura,” it recalls Plotinus’s view that time only came into existence because of the fall of the World Soul (anima mundi) from the spirit (nous). This view later influenced Saint Augustine, as he espouses a similar theory on the illusion of time in his Confessions.

• The end of the entire story suggests everyone being redeemed and reabsorbed into a common understanding, which recalls the doctrine of apocastasis — cf. Origen’s essentially neoplatonic belief in universal salvation.

• There’s also a song called “Eliphas Levi” (named after the French occultist) on Magma’s only album that doesn’t contribute to the Kobaïan saga, Merci (1987).

Obviously this is just a guess, but one gets the sense that Vander has spent some time researching the subject of esotericism, and much like John Coltrane, he appears to believe in a kind of sophia perennis, or traditional wisdom underpinning all the major religions which gives them validity relative to the semiotic framework of their adherents. I find myself wondering what he thinks of René Guénon and his particular brand of perennial traditionalism.

But what’s more important here to me — and this is, I think, an essential aesthetic takeaway for anyone interested in vast, ambitious projects of this nature, musical or otherwise — is that the music doesn’t start from the need to communicate a worked-out metaphysics or abstract theory. The music starts from the need to assert itself as music, something inherently valuable and irreducible to linguistic expression. Only after thorough inspection do we gain the ability to read metaphysics or ethics into the work. The liner notes provide the reader with clues as to what each record is trying to say, and there are occasional translations of the lyrics into French here and there, but an immense amount of care is taken not to burden the sounds with forced, linguistically-derived meaning.

IV. Summary of Aesthetic Principles

One of the major concerns I have as a writer is that the reduction of various art forms to language can have a parasitic effect on every other form of communication that can potentially take place within them. When things become excessively writer-driven, the words can completely disregard the framework in which they’re couched, if not directly contradict it, and thus every other aspect of the artistry suffers as a consequence. This tendency has had a marked effect on comics and animation, and it often happens in film.

But art should never be merely about the communication of abstract principles. One of art’s greatest achievements is that it can act as a respite from a world in which we’re instructed (often by our teachers — the people who should be helping us, not acting as our enemies!) to treat every little thing we encounter as indicative of some broader narrative at play, or emblematic of some “very important problem facing our society,” or amenable to some kind of allegory about this-or-that crisis facing the times. We’re taught to place virtually everything within a narrative context while concomitantly devaluing the things themselves that engender the suggested narrative. This kind of promiscuous meaning-making is rewarded in schools while they put less and less effort into teaching young people how to see and hear.

As a result, people do things like, I don’t know, spend their precious time watching TikTok videos in which some dummy does some dumb-ass thing, and then they think to themselves, “Ah! That dummy symbolizes a very important problem facing our society!” as they pat themselves on the back for their trenchant analysis. When art is truly meaningful, it cripples that parasitic instinct which drives so much of today’s incessant chatter. Sometimes it deliberately subverts the instinct. Sometimes it only rewards it after forcing some serious self-reflection. Whatever it does, it does not encourage it in an unqualified manner. Good art teaches you to be media-illiterate, not media literate. It teaches you to forget how to see the forest from the trees and instead compels you to see the profundity of the leaves on the trees. And then, only once you’ve reached that state, then you can begin to ask yourself the bigger questions, having been forced to experience world anew.

So Magma is an important music project for this blog, since it amounts to an impressive attempt to communicate vast, far-reaching ideas through music but with the communication of the sounds themselves at the forefront of one’s awareness. The narrative component, with its moral and spiritual implications, lingers unobtrusively in the background, even encouraging the listeners to come up with their own exegesis. Essentially, the impulse of free artistic play precedes every logical proposition, and Vander uses that impulse to guide every decision and establish every parameter.

The purpose of Magma is to compel the listener to meditate on vast, far-reaching questions and notions concerning permanent things, not transient minutiae or ephemeral issues of the day, and they are thankfully unblemished by the pox of overly fixed allegorical meanings or excessively determinative symbolism. As with all good music, there’s a paradox that underpins their efforts: musicians that impose abstract theoretical ideas onto their work, like Robert Wyatt for instance, typically redirect the listeners from contemplating higher, transcendental concerns toward focusing on meaningless nonsense — what Martin Heidegger called “the they” — even though they’re convinced that their intentions are to lead the listener to revolutionary liberation. But the musicians that relinquish interpretive control of their work, simply trusting the fact of their own compositional integrity to move the listener, are much more successful in leading her to abstract questions of the highest order — questions concerning God, the devil, hell, heaven, good, evil, the beginning of time, the end of eternity, and so on, and so forth. Steam Calliope Scherzos, it should go without saying, believes in the superiority of the latter approach.

Concluding Appendix: But Aren’t They Fascists?!?!?!?!?

Once you appreciate the sensibility that guides Vander’s music, the accusations of fascism that have been repeatedly leveled at him over the decades become all the more negligible — not because they’re “wrong” per se but more because they’re basically irrelevant. They also have been there with the band since the very beginning — something to be expected, I suppose, given progressive rock’s association with the British upper-middle class, advanced-degree education, Marxism, and thus what the Unabomber once famously (and accurately) called “oversocialization.” Benjamin Piekut’s book about Henry Cow, The World Is A Problem (2019), summarizes the longstanding accusations of fascism this way:

Vander, in fact, had been dogged by whispered accusations of neo-Nazism. Magma’s visual imagery seemed to allude to fascist style in the uniformity of their black-leather wardrobe and the atavistic iconography of their logo. Their mythology, with its militaristic stories about the judgment of civilizations and their “purification,” strengthened these associations. Furthermore, Vander occasionally expressed Nietzschean themes in the press, as when he told Melody Maker’s Steve Lake, “Most people now have too much self-esteem, believing that humans are the highest possible thing… Until you reach the highest state you can get to, you are always nothing compared to the universe.” In light of these vague connotations seemingly offered up by Magma, their music— both in composition and performance— evoked fascism in its fetishization of strength, discipline, uniformity, precision, and control. (In fact, one Cow remembers walking to a bar with Vander before a gig somewhere in France and observing him deliver the Nazi salute to passersby, almost as a joke.) This interpretation circulated in the 1970s to a sufficient extent that [Henry Cow drummer, Chris] Cutler would make a passing but direct reference to it in his appraisal of the band in 1979: “ 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.”

Now, for some reason, I feel obligated to put all of this in perspective, although to be honest, this discussion should not amount to anything more than a mere footnote, because it’s so bland and ponderous. But I suppose that you could make the claim that Magma are engaged in some kind of “ur-fascism” if you really wanted to, even though most of their ideas have echoes in earlier traditions and they lack the distinctly modern giveaways of “ur-fascism” according to how the idea was first postulated. Additionally: if you feel like isolating some racist or antisemitic comments that Vander is alleged to have said in the past, treating them as all the proof you need of his fascism, then so be it. Or, if the mere fact that he agreed to an interview with a right-wing magazine is enough to damn him forever, then by all means, proceed. Or, if you feel like interpreting Magma’s lyrics and imagery as being filled with cryptic references to Adolf Hitler with a degree of paranoid imaginativeness that rivals some of the wildest lyrical interpretations of heavy metal bands seen during the Satanic Panic, then hey, knock yourself out.

But then again, when we’re dealing with an artist whose musical approach is so clearly characterized by the refusal to indulge in matters of historical specificity, predigested narratives, or ephemeral, paltry concerns about matters of the state, the accusation of “fascist” truly comes across as just so petty, so small, at least to anyone who does not possess a small soul of his own, that one can’t help but feel total contempt for the person sincerely making the charge. Personally, I fail to see how harboring some private fascist sympathies could amount to anything more than giving Vander an additional bit of interesting trivia to add to his life story — as interesting as, say, the fact that he played gigs with Mal Waldron and Chick Corea in the 1960s, or had family members involved with organized crime, or had some Jews in his band and even married one for a while before parting on amiable terms. Kinda weird guy, that Vander! Lived a full and complicated life, it seems!

At a certain point, one has to ask the question: what exactly is at stake here? And as much as I hate to say it as a proud WASP, this really is a question that the Anglo-Saxon mind — which has been guilty of flooding the art world with so much concept-forward, logorrheic drivel — cannot accept as valid, at least not without some desperately-needed soul-searching. Its tortured history of sola fide Protestant theology has left the entire English-speaking world with the widespread opinion that people’s private opinions on inconsequential subjects not only matter, but matter a lot. “Damn that Magma! Damn them!” the morally conscious prog rock nerd says to himself. “Why couldn’t Christian Vander be a supporter of a good bloodthirsty mass-murdering dictator like Chairman Mao Zedong? Why couldn’t he be more like my heroes in Henry Cow?” What a tortured soul, this soi-disant connoisseur of the arts with a graduate degree. Well… listen. If the mere thought that Vander has some sort of hidden right-wing agenda bothers you so much, as it seems to bother so many people wailing and gnashing their teeth in the prog rock forums and on Reddit, then I will gently assuage your concerns with this: your brain has been poisoned by politics, which you’ve accepted into your heart as a surrogate religion, and this acceptance amounts to a terminal illness from which you will never recover. You are doomed to be mediocre for the rest of your life. You are too small, both mentally and spiritually to appreciate this music, you were never capable of understanding what it was attempting to do, and you simply never had a chance. You can do yourself a favor, stop trying, and finally feel some relief. Go listen to a Taylor Swift album instead. Go buy a Funko Pop. Order some fast food through Door Dash. You have my word: you’ll get through this.