Today's offering is a clip of French progressive band Magma, appearing in a 1972 film.
Magma is not exactly easy listening, performing the majority of their songs in their own language - Kobaian - and developing hugely ambitious and complicated concept works.
The band centres on drummer Christan Vander, and were originally inspired by John Coltrane's firey jazz explorations. Over the decades they have developed a unique sound that manages to reference free jazz, modern classical and soul as well as incredibly ambitious
They influenced a whole sub genre of music, a bombastic and energetic type of progressive roq called zeuhl (from the word meaning 'celestial' in Kobaian) including bands like Univers Zero from Belgium and Ruins from Japan.
Certainly a long way from the rather bloodless pastoral whimsy that seemed to inform much of the British progressive scene at the time.
The clip is from the movie "Moi Y En A Vouloir Des Sous". The track has never been released officially, which is extraordinary given how good it is.
The band are still very much active, and last year produced a 12-disc box set collecting their complete studio albums along with two discs of rarities. They also released the album Emehntehtt-Re, completing a trilogy that they began in the 70s with the album Kohntarkosz and continue to play live, although with a very different line up from the 70s version of the band, Vander and wife Stalla being the only constants in the line-up.
For more Magma and magma-influenced Zeuhl bands go to this fantastic french blog page >>
There will be more Magma on the site in the future that's for sure.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Thank you so much for introducing me to this clip. Its absolutely fantastic. Its sad that the track is unreleased, especially considering its one of the bands more jazz oriented pieces. I wanna find a copy of the movie just for that scene alone. If you have any info on it, please send a link. Thanks
ReplyDelete