For a quarter of a century Christian Vander's Magma have been engaged in a musical quest that frames visions of apocalypse and redemption with bulldozing experimental fusion. In this exclusive interview, Vander talks to Paul Stump about invented languages, John Coltrane, children's songs and the striving towards the light.
I'm
sitting in a tiny theatre in Paris waiting to see my first performance by
(and conduct my first interview with) Christian Vander. Magma. The name of
the group that Vander has led, on and off, for much of the last quarter of
a century is an appropriate tag for his music; suggestive of seismic activity,
volcanic eruptions, torrential flows of molten lava cooling into huge edifices
of solid rock. In those 25 years, Vander has recorded the most towering and
ambitious music ever to be damned by the label 'Progressive rock'. But the
audience at this particular Paris show isn't made up of the acid-casualties,
Kobaïan kompletists and fortysomething Prog nostalgia freaks one might
expect. Instead, I'm surrounded by sickeningly winsome under-fives. Vander's
latest project, A Tous Les Enfants, isn't another brontosaurial cosmic epic.
It is, as the title suggests, a show for kids. "I don't just write Magma-type
stuff, you know" he says, fixing me with his spookily intense stare.
But isn't this a bit offbeat, even for you, Christian? "No," he
says mildly. "Ali my music has at its heart a logical progression. I
just write it for different occasions. There are various aspects of it. At
the moment I just happen to be writing for children. And it's a real pleasure
performing to them..."
The mythology
that has built up around Vander, of a grim, obsessive paramilitary, is an
apt counterpoint to the phantasmagoria he has catalogued in his work. But
like all myths, it admixes a little more fiction than fact. And despite two
and a half decades of unrelenting media enmity of the sort that vilifies pre-punk
70s rock (and groups like Magma in particular) as a kind of giant historical
aberration, the myth still has a following. The response to a brief Magma
namecheck in The Wire last year indicated that it wasn't only the Ambient
rediscoveries of Krautrock (so admirably outlined in these pages by Julian
Cope in The Wire 130) that warranted a journey back in time and space : it
was time to reopen the files on another Euro-rock legend long since fingered
as one of pop's ultimate actes noires.
"Ask me anything you want," he says. "I'll try and help."
But it isn't easy; the myth gets in the way. I expected to meet a wild-eyed,
polysyllabic fount of Gallic enigmas; but the hirsute Vander, for all his
musical excesses, is a remarkably reticent man and tends towards shy generalisations
in his answers. "I don't understand where everyone gets this image of
me from," he complains.
Maybe from the score-or-so albums, recorded under various pseudonyms (Magma
simply being the best known), with which Vander has produced some of Europe's
most relentlessly bizarre popular music. While 'popular' may not mean what
it once did to Vander (and Magma were very big in Europe in the 70s), his
esoteric odyssey continues.
Magma's
formation, in 1969, coincided with the belated consecration of a French rock
culture. Fertilised more by indigenous folk and parlour sang as well as the
musics of Eastern and Southern European immigrants, French pop songs only
paid comparatively token homage to the jazz and blues elements so central
to Anglophone pop, and it was this that the roisterous bouleversements of
60s youth culture sought to subvert in their music. But in discovering The
Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd, putative French rockers (the better
ones, in any case) found the traditional bonds of their musical upbringing
more of an inspiration than an encumbrance. Additionally, there was French
jazz (largely, but not entirely, independent of the French chanson heritage)
to draw on as well. And so, as Situationism sought to dismantle the Spectacle,
the French rock scene set about rearranging the pieces in some stunning musical
hybrids all but unknown to British audiences : Ange (Brel versus Genesis),
Barricade (Zazou 'n' Racaille before the event), Etron Fou Leloublan (Folk
Rock In Opposition), and, inevitably, Magma As Germany's technocratic post-war
miracle and resultant urban alienation fed the futuristic, hardware-orientated
inspiration of the Krautrock groups, se the multicultural vibrancy and instability
of 60s Paris informed French rock's own Year Zero of 1969. But to Vander's
reckoning, only one year counts. "1967," he says. "The year
John Coltrane died. It seemed to me that afterwards, it was as though music
had to try to start all over again. Someone had to pick up the pieces, go
on searching in the way that he had. Nobody could match him, but people could
pick up the flame. It was almost impossible for anyone to do anything new
after Coltrane, but you had to try, try to find other new directions. Sa that's
what I tried to do with Magma. I was a bit young at the time, but…"
He tried anyway. "Sure, things were happening in 1968," he says
now. "I just tried to contribute what I could on the musical front"
Magma may
not have been the most subversive of French groups but they were certainly
the most arresting. Their first album (Magma, 1970) set the tone, a double
LP of explosive and frequently cacophonous semi-improvised rock, bulldozed
on by Vander's astonishing drumming and Francis Moze's apocalyptic bass playing.
Magma, the relation in music of a vast interplanetary voyage, was the first
part of a multi-album extravaganza, Theusz Hahmtaahk, which set out to chronicle
the death of Earth and the migration of humanity to Vander's invented planet
Kobaïa and the ultimate return of the all-powerful deity Ptäh. All
this was (is) related in Vander's own Kobaïan language (which took its
'vocabulary' partly from Leone Thomas's scat-yodelling vocal style), and declaimed
either by the steely-brilliant voice of Vander's wife Stella, the powerhouse
singer Klaus Blasquiz or massive quasi-operatic choruses. (As Magma expert
Michael Draine has observed, "The abstraction provided by the Kobaïan
verse seems to inspire Magmas singers to heights of emotional abandon rarely
permitted by conventional lyrics.") "It wasn't at all easy to compose
for forces like that at first," admits Vander now. "I was only in
my early twenties. But it was the only way to say what I wanted to say…"
What followed was a voyage appropriately as vast as that recounted on Magma.
The music didn't change much, but then it didn't have to. It was a towering
bricolage of styles; unique, at least in terms of the rock tradition Magma
were shoehorned into. Although the metric propulsion of Vander and Moze recalled
contemporary jazz rock, the music was never of the cheesecloth-shirted, funkily
suburban kind that would have attracted major record labels. No Corea-style
whimsy here; no McLaughlinesque lushness: instead, an apocalypse of massively
amplified collective improvisation. "Jazz is very important in my music,"
says Vander. "I listened to all the greats - thanks to my mother. We
moved to Paris when I was very young and I was introduced to the Parisian
club scene in the late 50s and early 60s. I was lucky - I was able to see
and hear wonderful musicians. Great drummers: Max Roach, Elvin Jones, Kenny
Clarke, Tony Williams later on. And Chet Baker gave me my first drum kit."
Vander
incorporated Western classical elements too, but not the grade five Bach transcriptions
of most Prog rock. "Wagner, of course; everyone always mentions Wagner,"
he smiles. "But that's largely to do with scale and structure. I was
also very receptive to more contemporary composers: Stravinsky [hear how Vander
uses rhythm as a basis for melody]; Bartok, too [ditto the shrill, Eastern
European folk influences]." Coltrane's influence was echoed in long stretches
of music reserved for fast and hard-blowing soloists that also recalled Ornette
Coleman. While other musicians who had come to fusion via circuitous routes
(R&B, classical training, jazz studies, genre musics) studied sitar notation
or buddied up to Sri Chinmoy, Vander was into Transylvanian harmolodics; with
the cosmic angle thrown in, it was like a rocked-up take on Sun Ra's Myth
Arkestra. But nobody ever accused Sun Ra of pretentiousness the way they've
mercilessly pilloried Vander.
It was popular pretension, though; Magma's marathon concerts drew considerable
crowds and the group stormed the 1973 Newport Jazz Festival, even bringing
some attention from the traditionally parochial UK. "The French reaction
to Magma was, initially, one of complete surprise. At the quality, for a start,"
he grins. "They didn't believe Frenchmen could play like that. And they
found the music too violent, too aggressive… too hard." Surprisingly
(and a little ingenuously) he denies any native influence. "I don't think
there's anything French about my music [it's always 'my music'] because my
roots are Eastern European. [There are many Hungarian and Romanian elements
in the Kobaïan 'tongue'.]. You can hear that in the music. France hardly
comes into it at all. Perhaps a bit, but net consciously."
What is surprising about Vander's resolutely monumental and ritualistic music
is its abrasiveness and intensity. Hhaï: Live, which documents a 1975
Magma live performance, is perhaps the best recorded example of the group's
sound. The music often remains largely tonal, lavish in conception, and symphonically
structured into sweeping sections. Although it lacks the improvisational jouissance
of a Zappa or Hendrix at full tilt, the energy level is staggering, capsizing,
in a unique way, conventional notions of how such opulent musical resources
should be treated. Moreover, there are no Floydian bliss-outs or synthesized
sybaritism. ("I'm not keen on too many electronic instruments,"
says Vander. "They're not always very practical.")
What about the death-defying balance of the composed and improvised in his
music? Here Vander is a bit vague. "There are some themes I put together
strictly for group working out, for solo or group improvisations. Others are
wholly structured. But if anyone wants to contribute anything…"
He shrugs, giving the lie to the popular notion of him as Nemoid control freak.
Throughout
the 70s, Magmas pre-eminence brought French musicians flocking. Sidemen came
and vent at will (one of the mort notable being the brilliant bassist Jannick
Top), forming and dissolving their own Vander-influenced groups (Zao, Weidorje).
There were even links with avant garde noisemakers Heldon, Magma's only real
rival in the French underground, and other darkside Eurorockers such as Art
Zoyd and Univers Zero admitted a debt to Vander's vision. Even today, younger
groups attempting to rewrite the European Prog tradition - Xaal (France),
Anekdoten (Sweden) - freely cite his influence.
Magma fell dormant in 1984, but it meant little; the music was always Vander's
(he coined the term 'zeuhl music' to describe the canon he was creating).
"Magma was just a name I used for it. I wanted to compose and play on
different levels. I started up a jazz trio [to act as an outlet for his still-obsessive
love of Coltrane], and also I started up Offering - a bit controversially."
Offering a percussion and voice-dominated ensemble in the Magma musical tradition,
showed signs of jettisoning the chugging rock pulses which had underpinned
Vander's music for so long. Now it seemed as if he was willing to let some
light into the music, learning to use space as an enriching compositional
device rather than fitting subject matter for a concept album.
Does he take much notice of contemporary musical developments? "Net very
much," he sighs. "I never listen to the radio. I don't watch TV.
Mind you, I never did listen to much else. I'm often too busy with my own
work. I try to keep up with what's happening in jazz; a lot of my musicians
are active in that sphere, but that's about it. There's also a real problem
for creative music now. There are so many schools, so many genres of music,
it's getting difficult to achieve anything new. It's almost like we have to
unlearn in order to rediscover ways of seeing and doing." It's much the
same when I ask him how he perceives his audience: are his followers young
or old? "I don't know!" He laughs this time. "I'm told there's
many young people in the audience still, which is great. But when I get out
on stage behind the drums, I just play. I never look - I just want to do my
best. Now, playing in front of kids - that's different. They're so receptive."
Christian
Vander is still as hyperactive as his best music. One current project, Les
Voix Du Magma, a 12 piece featuring seven vocalists and five instrumentalists
is to be augmented soon by an orchestral project ("Anything between 50
and 150 musicians"), incorporating a transcription of the whole of Theusz
Hahmtaahk. "Originally, I'd wanted to do Theusz Hahmtaahk for orchestra,
but it was impossible to put together in the 70s. Now, who knows? In fact,
I'd love to do more with the orchestra, full stop. But it's difficult. What
I need is a Mad King Ludwig to finance me!" he says, referring to Wagner's
great benefactor.
Vander stresses that he is keen to emphasise his personality in his music,
and there's certainly little chance of him ever hiding his light under a bushel.
For example, A Tous Les Enfants might have been conceived as a performance
for children, but the Paris show contained systems music, MOR passages, ballads,
sampled atmospheres, clowning and a closing section which turned a traditional
French lullaby into a nightmarish, polytonal Gregorian invocation.
Vander seems to adhere not just to Coltrane's musical vision but also his
conception of music as something intrinsically transcendent. Certainly this
notion seems to inform his fanatical missionary zeal, and his idealist striving
for absolutes burns as brightly as ever: when I asked him about A Tous Les
Enfants, the first thing he said vas, "It's vital to get across to children
that they are the future, and that they should be valued for that reason.
"A Tous Les Enfants," he continues, "is a work that banishes
all contradictions - wealth and poverty, happiness and sadness. I dislike
such things. Kobaïan, the language, is meant to eliminate ambiguities
in human expression, the oppositions which divide humanity. My message is
a positive one: life, the striving towards the light."
The whole concept of Kobaïa, it seems, is less a mere tool for communicating
ideas or a planetary imagining of Vander's distant post; it's an entire holistic
mindset (the striking Kobaïa logo which Vander wears perennially around
his neck is an example).
"Of course I will go on working in Kobaïan," he says. (For
the record, A Tous Les Enfants is in French.) "I invented Kobaïan
because French just wasn't expressive enough. Either for the story or for
the sound of the music." In a sense, then, Kobaïan is something
of a red herring - the new language Vander invented wasn't just one of words,
but of music also: in his world, the two are inseparable.
The music
of Christian Vander is no longer at the cutting edge. If he's aware of that
- and one gets the impression that he is - he doesn't care. Because to be
at the cutting edge means being a constituent of something else, and that's
one thing Vander's music has never been.
Vander doesn't march to the beat of a different drummer. He is a different
drummer. And that's surely something worth celebrating, irrespective of what
language you use.
Paul Stump
Some records: Magma (aka Kobaïa) (Seventh REX IV/V); 1001 Centigrade
(Seventh REX VI), Mekanïk Destruktïw Kommandöh (Seventh REX
VII); Wurdah Ïtah (Seventh REX IX); Köhntarkösz (Seventh REX
VIII); Hhaï/Live (Seventh REX X/IX); Üdü Wüdü (Seventh
REX XII), Attahk (Seventh REX XIII).
In addition to the above releases, most of Christian Vander's recordings are now available on the Seventh label and are distributed in the UK by Harmonia Mundi. For more information contact Seventh Records, 101 Avenue Jean Jaures, 93800 Epinay-sur-Seine, France. The Magma fanzine, Ork Alarm!, can be reached at PO Box 419, Erith, Kent DA8 1 TE. Special thanks to Stephen Farmer, Paul Mummery, Christian Vander, Pascal Zelcer, Christelle Chaigné and Trevor Manwaring.
Source : The Wire - Issue 137
- July 1995
Zeuhl Merci : Jean-Marc Delville
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Zïha Daniel / akoustikus pour le document