All Music Guide Biography Led by classically-trained drummer Christian Vander, the Paris-based Magma was, in their way, perhaps the ultimate progressive-rock group; while other artists achieved greater commercial success and critical acclaim, Magma typified the many ambitions and excesses of the genre which won it as many detractors as fans, even going so far as to invent their own lyrical and musical language in order to bring their unique vision to life. The son of a jazz pianist, Vander initially followed in his father's footsteps, modeling his technique on the work of John Coltrane alum Elvin Jones and starting his career with a number of jazz and R&B outfits. While in Paris in 1969, however, he was struck by a vision of earth's spiritual and ecological future which so disturbed him that he decided to explore his fears by musical means, assembling Magma with the aid of wife and vocalist Stella, singer Klaus Blasquiz, and fusion bassists Francis Moze and Jannick Top. As outlined on the group's eponymous 1970 double-album debut, Vander's tale -- projected to be told over the course of ten LPs -- pitted earth against a rival planet named Kobaia. Over the course of 1971's 1001 Centigrade and 1973's Mekanïk Destructïw Kommandoh (recorded with a choir), the story -- much of it told in native Kobaian -- unfolded to depict an earth so uninhabitable that its citizens must flee to the nearby planet, where years of conflict culminated in the achievement of cosmic harmony and a reconciliation with the deity Ptäh. Chart success was not orthcoming, and after a few early tours of the U.S. and Britain Magma spent the middle years of the decade almost exclusively in France, where they launched records including 1974's Kohntarkosz and the next year's Live. After the commercial failure of 1976's Udu Wadu and 1977's Edits, Magma essentially disbanded, although the group lived on in various forms, as alumni founded a number of loosely-affiliated splinter groups to carry on Vander's work in subsequent years, including Art Zoyd, Univers Zero, Ensemble Nimbus, Happy Family and Ruins. In 1983, Vander himself resurfaced with the acoustic project Offering, but later returned to more grandiose designs with Les Voix de Magma, an attempt to resurrect his early material for a new generation of listeners. --Jason Ankeny, Yuri Jossa's Biography MAGMA was a French group led by composer / percussionist / pianist Christian Vander, formed in the early 1970's. MAGMA's music is difficult to describe; it is ethereal and yet violent, ethnic and yet very European; it combines musical elements from composers such as Carl Orff, Bela Bartok and Richard Wagner with other influences such as the music of John Coltrane, Jazz and European folk music. Christian Vander's visionary music, operatic vocalizations and choruses were sung in a special language: Köbaian; a complete idiom with its own phonetics and vocabulary, created by Vander to express the intensity of the music. MAGMA's music have influenced and inspired a whole generation of musicians such as Belgium's UNIVERS ZERO and other groups around the world, to create music that combines elements of 20th century classical, jazz and rock music with modern instrumentation and electric / electronic instruments. This music is often categorized as "Zeuhl" music. Yuri Jossa

Udu Wudu Liner Notes Imagine, if you will, the perfect jazz-rock drummer. He would combine superb technique with unfailing instinct for his music, and passionate involvement with it. He'd know when not to play at all, when softly to underline the beat, and when subtly to counter it, when to explode with bold, up-front, off-beat counter rhythmic fills, and when just to play loud, coming down on every beat as the band shifts into overdrive behind him. Then take your perfect drummer and bless him with as much raw compositional talent as you dare. Give him a wildly diverse background that allows him to to love Stockhausen, Eastern European folk music, Coltrane, Chuck Berry, Wagnerian opera,, Carl Orff, mystic chanting, and a half dozen other things -- but make sure he has the courage to create his own music, straight from the soul. Finally, give your drummer an entire country-sized jazz-rock underground to work from, and enough respect among his fellow musicians to draw consistently the finest players from that scene away from their egos for a year or two --to play the drummer's own music, to love it, to face the challenge of playing it until the energy and commitment involved in doing so every night become simply overwhelming, and it is necessary to return to the land where 'jazz-rock' means 'the drummer keeps a beat and we all get to solo.' What you have , then, is France's Christian Vander, and his band Magma. You can't really call Magma's music 'popular.' Vander utterly refuses to compromise his unique musical vision to reach a larger audience. When he realized that the French language was completely wrong for the sort of operatic vocals he envisioned, he made up his own language, Kobaian, and a science-fiction plot to explain its existence. He has found a remarkable singer, Klaus Blasquiz, whose dedication to the bands mystic and spiritual trappings (the planet Kobaia is a religious utopia) makes them entirely believable. Kobaia is certainly not a gimmick; rather, it creates a context in which to interpret the music. Eric Van - The Harvard Independent