Music On Vinyl / Seventh Claude Vorilhon was a racing car driver. He was a typical French man of the 1970s. Long hair, cigarettes, fast cars; he probably watched Un Homme Et Une Femme in the cinema. All of this changed for him abruptly at the end of 1973 when he had an alien visitation from an entity that called itself Jehovah. Those of you who are looking […]
Magma
7 posts
London 4 October 2019 The last time I saw Magma live was at an incredible performance in Paris in February 2017, when they played backed by an orchestra. This added an extra stirring and unearthly quality to Magma’s already off-world sound. It was also the finest performance I had seen the band play in the many times I have seen them. Islington Assembly Hall is a perfect kind […]
Southern Lord Retrospektïẁ I, II and III are the crown jewels of the Magma empire. You’ll get told elsewhere that those jewels are located in the 1970s studio albums by Magma. You will get told that by people who cannot tell you why Christian Vander waited until 1980 to bring the key players of Magma back together at Olympia to record “Theusz Hamthaak”. If you don’t understand why “Theusz […]
London 8 May 2015 I remember quite a few years back after a Magma show, a friend of mine turning to me and saying, “That was like being on another planet for two hours”. And he was right, very few bands make you transcend to another realm but Magma has the capacity to do this. Maybe it’s because the songs are sung Kobaïan, a language invented by band […]
Jazz Village (Before we go any further, a word about the title: you saw the caron on the s, didn’t you? Yes, of course you did. And that immediately suggested to you that Šlag Tanz is pronounced Schlag Tanz and you didn’t have a silly schoolboy [or girl] moment, did you? Good, and furthermore you get the Germanic sense of the word that indicates something like Shock Dance, […]
Seventh Five DVDs into Magma‘s series of live sessions at Le Triton,we find the pioneers of Zeuhl way out there beyond the Theusz Hamtaahk trilogy and exploring some of the stranger byways of their œuvre along with some dazzling new material. The entire programme runs to about two hours. There are a few interludes during which audience members, including Steve Davis, are interviewed about their relationship to the […]
7th In a time when most CD albums stretch beyond the 60 minute mark, to receive an album with only two tracks that lasts a mere 32 minutes seems rather odd. But what we have to remember here is that this is not any ordinary 32 minutes, it is 32 minutes of Magma, which is the equivalent to 70 by a lot of other artists. From its opening […]