Magma, the strangest rock band of all time, needs you to help finance a documentary film about their life and work.
So here goes. Up until a year or so ago I'd never heard of the French prog rock band Magma, or at least their music had never penetrated my consciousness. But last year while spending the month of May in Paris, I visited a bunch or record stores (and book stores and comic stores...) and noticed records and CDs by this band Magma prominently displayed, like I should know who they are or something. It took me a while to notice enough that I forced myself to dig a bit deeper and read up about them online and maybe listen to a bit of their music. I liked it, for sure, but didn't really get all that excited. Prog rock isn't really my thing. But earlier this year I discovered their off-shoot band One Shot -- who have a much more jazz rock/fusion sound -- gave Magma another listen. But again, not too much of an impact yet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-fs-bLBevU
And then I attended Magma's concert here in Toronto as part of their Endless Tour....the only other musical experience I can recall that was even stranger and more compelling was a Sun Ra concert I attended way back in the late 1980's in Montreal. I was blown away, which was not bad for -- at the very last minute -- deciding to attend a concert by a band I really didn't know all that much about.
Sinuous and pulsating, their music is a kind of hybrid of the intense, ecstatic jazz of John Coltrane or Pharoah Sanders and the over-the-top operatic bombast of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. You know, the music that always plays in horror movies as the gates of hell open and a monster emerges to devour all mankind.
Of course, Magma's lyrics are sung/chanted in the the language created by founder Christian Vander: Kobaïan. With a cosmic storyline about refugees fleeing a environmentally devastated Earth to settle on the planet Kobaïa. Created by Vander in the late 1960s, Magma is truly as unique as unique gets. Other bands say they are unique, Magma lives it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzyOi5XRu_g
Fast forward to 2-16. Some dedicated fans from Vancouver want to make a documentary film about Magma and they've setup a Kickstarter (running until April 27th) to raise a bit of the money they need to finance the project. That Kickstarter is here. Let's support a film about a truly unique artist with a vision like none other.
As a bit of supplemental reading, here are a few cool bits I've found explaining the Magma phenomenon.
- Revolutionary Eruption: The Violent Sound of Magma and Musical Fusion in 1970s France
- Magma's cheerfully insane brand of Sci-Fi avant garge make the prog rock's weirdest outliers
- A Prog Supreme: Magma in the 70s
- Immersing oneself in Magma: a Christian Vander interview
- Magma: The story of the last day
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