Magma: Christian Vander, an invented language, and records released backwards

Twenty-nine years. Thirty-nine. Forty-two.

Those are Magma’s three longest compositions, measured by how long each one took to exist whole on a record.

The starting dates aren’t the same kind of event, and it’s worth saying so up front: the first count begins at the oldest groove that survives, the other two at the year the band itself gives as the beginning of the writing.

The usual way to tell this story is as a discography: a double debut in 1970, the masterpiece in 1973, a darker follow-up, then the drift, then the comeback thirty years later.

Told that way it can’t explain the strangest thing in the catalogue. A record composed thirty years earlier comes out in 2004, and the middle movement of a three-part work came out in 1974 as the soundtrack to somebody’s film, under a different title.

Magma doesn’t put out finished records. It puts out whatever state a work happens to be in when someone switches the tape machines on.

So the chapters below follow the works, not the records, because that’s the only order in which the dates add up. Three works. When each one started, what shape it was in when it hit a groove, how long it took to arrive complete.

Why a piece never actually finishes

Coltrane died in 1967 and Vander walked away from France, and he spent the next two years in Italy playing rhythm and blues in the kind of working bands that pay by the night.

Then, in 1969, something told him to go back and make his own music, and he left Italy within hours. He tells it that way every time.

The name came later, in a café. The band didn’t have one and a Paris club told them that without a name there’d be no gig that night, so they went next door for coffee and Vander wrote Magma on the receipt.

That part is anecdote. What matters for everything else is how the pieces arrive in the first place, and Vander has described that the same way for thirty years, in interview after interview, without varying it.

There’s the material constraint, and it explains every date in this article: the words arrive with the music, in a language that doesn’t exist, so nobody can write them down while they’re coming out. What it needs is a piano and a tape machine left running. Every day.

A piece made like that never reaches a point where somebody decides it’s done, it reaches a point where the band walks into a studio, and those two things aren’t remotely the same.

Stella Vander says it plainly. They go into the studio because the piece is complete, except it isn’t, because he’s going to change something at the end, and then they take it back on stage and keep changing it for months, sometimes for years.

The language itself has a flat, practical explanation behind it. Vander never wanted to write in French and doesn’t speak English, and he wanted the voice to work the way an instrument works, understood without words the way a saxophone is understood.

A second constraint decides how many people it takes. While he was writing Mëkanïk, the band’s pianist Faton Cahen told him it sounded like Carl Orff and played him some, and Vander had never heard a note of it.

His reaction wasn’t about the music. It was about the headcount: that, he said, is the ideal orchestra for Magma. From then on the works need a choir, and a choir is expensive and hard to keep together.

Theusz Hamtaahk, a trilogy released backwards

Theusz Hamtaahk is a work in three movements of roughly half an hour each, and the third is the famous one, which happens to be the one that reached the shops first, a long time before either of the others.

Before it became that record it spent two years in public. A short version was cut in the summer of 1971 for a compilation called Puissance 13 + 2, with the line-up of the day leaning hard on the brass, and that recording is where the paper trail starts.

On 12 November 1971 the band played it in full at the Théâtre 140 in Brussels, and the label’s own note says it was already far more developed than the version taped three months earlier.

In January 1973 they recorded it again. That take mirrors a concert given two months before at the Sigma festival in Bordeaux, it’s almost entirely acoustic, and the choir isn’t the band’s own: those are the voices of the Storchhaus orchestra, brought in behind Stella and Klaus.

Then, in the spring of 1973, the line-up changed again and they cut the record everyone knows, at the Manor Studios in Oxford and at Aquarium, with Simon Heyworth and Gilles Sallé running the desks.

Two men survive from the previous band, Vander and Blasquiz. Jannick Top arrives on bass. Alongside Stella, who turns up here for the first time, four backing singers are credited by name: Muriel Streisfeld, Evelyne Razymovski, Michèle Saulnier, Doris Reinhardt.

This is the record most of us came in through, and none of us came in through the right movement, because the right movement wasn’t for sale.

The second movement arrived a year later, wearing a disguise.

Ẁurdah Ïtah is the soundtrack to Yvan Lagrange’s film Tristan et Iseult, and Magma’s name isn’t on it. Recording and mixing took three days at the Studio de Milan in Paris, barely a month before the sessions for the next album.

Four people play it. Vander on piano, drums and voice, Top on bass, Blasquiz and Stella singing, and that is the whole record: no brass, no choir, none of the weight its older sibling had.

All four are credited under their Kobaïan names, and Vander signs himself Zëbehn Straïn de Geustaah.

Try it from the point of view of somebody buying records in 1974. The middle movement of a three-part work comes out under the title of an art film, stripped down to a quartet, with nothing anywhere on the sleeve to say it’s the second of three.

As for the first movement, the one the whole work is named after, no studio version of it was ever made.

Hearing the three movements in order means waiting until 13 and 14 May 2000, when Magma marked an anniversary at the Théâtre du Trianon in Paris and played the whole thing, a hundred and thirty minutes of it.

The label says it’s the first and only record to contain all three. Twenty-nine years after that first groove.

Ëmëhntëhtt-Ré takes thirty-nine years

A month after Ẁurdah Ïtah, Vander turned and started a second cycle. The album is Köhntarkösz, and the story inside it follows a man who walks into an Egyptian priest’s tomb.

Again the record is the second part of three, and again the other two land in the following century, which by this point looks less like an accident and more like the way the band works. The ordering isn’t the interesting part, though. What happens to the material in between is.

Magma played the Marquee Club in London on 17 March 1974, and that concert exists as a record. The official page explains what you’re listening to with a precision no artist profile ever bothers with.

That paragraph, written by the band, is why a Magma discography can’t be read straight. Something played on a March evening in 1974 contains material that becomes an album in 2004, after three decades in a drawer. Thirty years, unheard.

K.A, short for Köhntarkösz Anteria, is the first part of the cycle. Its official page says it was written thirty years earlier and calls it the missing link between Mëkanïk and Köhntarkösz, and the band had been playing it live on stage since 2002 before finally recording it in 2004.

Part three, Ëmëhntëhtt-Ré, came out in 2009. Its page dates the start of the writing to 1975, says the composition reached fulfilment after more than three decades, and notes that it closes a second trilogy.

Even that wasn’t the end. The trilogy was performed complete only in November 2014, across a run of concerts at Le Triton, and those nights were recorded.

Two pages on the same official site disagree, and it’s worth flagging. The album page dates the start of the writing to 1975 and the trilogy page to 1973. We’ve kept 1975, which is also the year in the band’s biography.

Zëss: forty-two years, and somebody else on drums

Zëss has the longest history of the three, and its official page reads almost like a logbook.

A first draft appeared in 1977. The piece was finished gradually, debuted in concert in the spring of 1979, stayed in the repertoire for four years, and was then set aside in 1983. Set aside, and left there.

After that, in the label’s own words, the work was long plagued by its incompleteness and its recording was deferred for years. Four decades after the first draft it was finally cut in an orchestral version.

The record came out in 2019, shortly before the concert that opened the fiftieth anniversary tour at the Philharmonie de Paris. It was made in Prague with the city’s philharmonic, and the drummer on it is Morgan Ågren.

Zëss took us three listens before we noticed he wasn’t the one behind the kit.

What it sounded like to the people who were there

Dating the verdicts beats repeating them. Magma reached London on 5 December 1973, played the Marquee, and stayed on stage for more than three hours.

The people who wrote it up reached for adjectives and came back empty-handed. Devastatingly idiosyncratic. Immensely powerful. Music for all the way to eternity and back. One of them decided it was what Ken Russell would use to score the firebombing of Dresden.

Vander remembers the room going silent from beginning to end, then turning. People came up afterwards to tell him they were demons, that they’d been terrified and had loved it, and he says that was exactly the idea.

The strangest convert is Steve Davis, the snooker champion, who saw them at the Roundhouse in June 1974 when he was seventeen.

In 1988 he set up a promotions company for the sole purpose of bringing them to London for three nights at the Bloomsbury Theatre, and later admitted he hadn’t quite worked out, while signing, that he was funding a fourteen-piece band. The last night sold out.

What’s left, and who took it

Zeuhl is a genre now, and in specialist shops it sits next to jazz and pop, holding dozens of records that have nothing to do with Magma and everything to do with one drummer’s vocabulary.

Vander coined the word, and he coined it defensively, so that no other label could be pinned on the band. Asked what kind of music he makes, he says he uses one word only. Unclassifiable.

That’s worth being straight about, given that this piece sits in an archive where Magma is filed under prog. Vander says he barely listened to the bands of his own era, that he learned far more from jazz, and that Magma isn’t a prog rock group at all.

The inheritance comes with names attached. Weidorje was formed by two Magma alumni, the bassist Bernard Paganotti and the keyboard player Patrick Gauthier. Univers Zero in Belgium and Art Zoyd in France get described as sibling bands, and Koenji Hyakkei in Japan and Guapo in Britain are the generation after that.

The audience, meanwhile, moved somewhere nobody predicted. Magma play Roadburn, Hellfest and Psycho Las Vegas, all three of them metal festivals, and Stella Vander says the jazz festivals barely call any more.

Asked how he’d like to be remembered, Vander doesn’t talk about records at all. He talks about the music teachers who phone up wanting their pupils to play one of his pieces, and about the time Les Percussions de Strasbourg called.

The best outcome, he says, would be his music being played by people who haven’t been born yet.

We stop here, and it’s worth saying where. Half the catalogue after 1984 goes untouched in this article, including twelve CDs of live archive, because none of it changes the question we started from.

One thing does belong at the end, because it closes something. Kãrtëhl arrived in 2022 and the band called it a collective album: after decades in which not one of the dozens of musicians who passed through had offered a new piece, the compositions this time came from the others too.

Where to go next

Start with La Trilogie au Trianon, still the only place the three movements of Theusz Hamtaahk sit together. A hundred and thirty minutes, recorded live, so it isn’t the tidy version of anything. It’s the only version there is.

Then Mekanik Kommandoh, the January 1973 recording. It’s the same piece one step earlier, when it was almost entirely acoustic and the choir was on loan from an outside orchestra, which makes it the plainest evidence in the catalogue that a Magma record is a snapshot rather than a conclusion.

Marquee Club 1974 is the most useful record here for understanding the method, and the least comfortable to sit through. There are unfinished pieces on it, and if you know what to listen for, there’s material that would take thirty years to become an album.

Last, the discography pages at magmamusic.org. The band writes them, they’re free, and they carry the dates and the retractions that usually go unrecorded: what hadn’t been composed yet, what got taken out, the year a piece was put away.