Magma

Christian Vander, a drummer steeped in classical technique, has steered the Paris-rooted collective Magma, an outfit that in its singular fashion perhaps most fully embodied progressive rock’s sweeping scope. While other acts enjoyed wider sales and stronger notices, Magma personified the genre’s vaulting goals and indulgences, earning as many detractors as devotees and even devising an invented tongue for both words and music to realize its singular conception.

Born to a jazz pianist, Vander first mirrored his father by patterning his style after Elvin Jones, the John Coltrane alumnus, and launched his career in assorted jazz and R&B ensembles. A vision of Earth’s spiritual and ecological trajectory that he found deeply unsettling overtook him in Paris in 1969, prompting him to channel those anxieties into sound; with help from his wife and vocalist Stella, singer Klaus Blasquiz, and fusion bassists Francis Moze and Jannick Top, he assembled Magma.

The saga introduced on the group’s self-titled 1970 double-album debut framed Earth against a rival world named Kobaia and was planned to unfold across ten LPs. Through 1971’s 1,001 Centigrade and 1973’s Mekanïk Destructïw Kommandoh, the latter recorded with a choir, the tale—much of it delivered in Kobaian—depicted a planet grown uninhabitable, forcing its inhabitants to flee to the neighboring sphere, where extended conflict finally yielded cosmic equilibrium and reconciliation with the deity Ptäh.

Hit records remained elusive, and after early tours of the U.S. and Britain the band concentrated almost solely on France through the mid-1970s, releasing Kohntarkosz in 1974 and Live the following year. The commercial disappointment of 1976’s Üdü Wüdü and 1977’s Inédits effectively ended the original run, though Magma survived in altered guises as alumni formed loosely related splinter groups to extend Vander’s vision, while later ensembles including Art Zoyd, Univers Zero, Ensemble Nimbus, Happy Family, and Koenji Hyakkei absorbed its influence. Vander resurfaced in 1983 with the acoustic project Offering yet soon returned to larger-scale ambitions via Les Voix de Magma, an effort to reintroduce his early repertoire to fresh listeners.

In the mid-1990s he reconstituted Magma proper, drawing in Stella Vander, several musicians new to the fold, and occasional appearances by earlier members, thereby beginning an extended cycle of recordings and concerts that blended recent material with selections from the band’s classic era. Kohntarkosz Anteria (K.A.) arrived in 1995 as the central chapter of a trilogy launched by the 1974 Kohntarkosz album, with the trilogy’s final installment, Emehntehtt-Re, issued in 2009. During the same span Magma preserved numerous live performances on CD and DVD, among them the La Trilogie au Trianon sets captured at the 30th-anniversary concerts in Paris in May 2000 and the Live in Tokyo two-CD set recorded in 2005. The band also surveyed 35 years of its history across a four-week residency at Le Triton in Paris in May 2005, an engagement documented on the four-volume Mythes et Légendes DVD series released between 2006 and 2008.