Here’s a question for you. You have a really vivid nightmare about the end of the world. Upon waking do you a) hit the bong, b) give it a lousy Rotten Tomatoes score because the special effects were abysmally low budget or c) form a band that has made music so alien (literally!) they had to come up with a whole new genre to put it in (Zeuhl) featuring lyrics sung (or often spoken) in a language (Kobaïan) which literally nobody on the planet can understand because, hey, you just made it up on the spot?
Franch composer/singer/drummer Christian Vander went for the last option, and he went whole hog, forming a band called Magma in 1969 that came complete with its own mythology (mankind sets off from ravaged Planet Earth to Kobaïa, a planet where you can’t even hear Foghat, which sounds like hell to me). The death of John Coltrane also played a part in Vander’s existential crisis, and Vander (a modest fellow) figured he was the guy to fill the void Coltrane left behind. The result was Magma’s 1970 self-titled debut, which hardly fills the Coltrane hole but is bona fide listenable if very mechanistic jazz fusion with some truly wild playing. And some really annoying singing.
After that, however, things began to get truly weird. Magma’s 1971 follow-up 1001° Centigrades was a far less listener-friendly affair, with the jazz fusion slowly giving away to what sounds to me like bad intergalactic musical theater—less off-Broadway than off-Jupiter. Zeuhl is generally defined as a melting pot of jazz fusion, symphonic rock, and neoclassical music, but the jazz fusion was rapidly taking a back seat to Vander’s operatic pretensions. He had a grander vision than making Magma Kobaïa’s equivalent of Weather Report. He had Wagner (although oddly enough I’ve never heard the old anti-Semite cited as an influence) in his sights.
And 1001° Centigrades is mainstream stuff in comparison to 1973’s Mëkanïk Dëstruktïẁ Kömmandöh. Zeuhl is Kobaïan for celestial music, but I hear no insterstellar harmony in Mëkanïk Dëstruktïẁ Kömmandöh, just the soundtrack to some inhospitable astral plane’s equivalent of the Nuremberg Rallies. But it made waves nonetheless, even won Magma an invite to the 1973 Newport Jazz Festival, and this despite its not being jazz, not by any earthling’s stretch of the imagination. Evidently one man’s Third Reich Mood Muzak is another man’s hep cat sound. I can’t help but wonder what Herbie Mann, who also played the festival, thought.
But, and here’s where things get REALLY scary, Mëkanïk Dëstruktïẁ Kömmandöh is not the album Vander wanted to unleash on an unsuspecting public. Vander’s record company recoiled in horror at the album in its native state, and flatly refused to release it. So it was shelved, and Mëkanïk Dëstruktïẁ Kömmandöh was released as a compromise. A compromise? It’s about as uncompromising album as you’ll ever hear. What in Odin’s ear could the original have sounded like?
Be careful of the questions you ask. Because the original finally saw the light of day in 1989; my guess is it escaped some record label gulag in France, despite the bars and guard dogs and razor wire, intent on inflicting revenge. Entitled Mekanïk Kommandöh, it lacks the sweeteners (such as they are) of the 1973 release—guitar, brass, and flute are gone, along with xylophone and vibraphone, and the jazz and rock touches are buried in vocals and more vocals—this is rock opera without the rock, although you do get some brief passages where the drums kick up a storm and the organ, when it deigns to show up, has a swirling psychedelic edge to it. The frequent shifts in tempo, time signatures and the like make it progressive rock. But can it be called progressive rock if it does not rock? And can it even be called progressive? Is this progress? Not in this man’s world!
Vander looked to the Germanic and Slavic languages when he created Kobaïan, and it gives Mëkanïk Kömmandöh, with its dystopian vibe, declamatory speeches and heavy reliance on vocals, a decidedly martial vibe. Vander has cited the 20th Century German composer Carl Orff, who was big on opera and cantatas and the like, as an influence, and it tells. I tend to laugh when I hear it, but it’s a nervous laugh, and I doubt I’m alone in hearing echoes of the totalitarian in it. If Zeuhl means celestial, this can hardly be meant to be the sound of the stars in harmonious alignment. This is Mars music, and by that I don’t mean the Spiders of but Mars as the God of War. A love supreme it ain’t.
Unlike Mëkanïk Dëstruktï Kömmandöh, 1989’s Mëkanïk Kömmandöh consists of only one song, called (it’s confusion time!) “Mëkanïk Dëstruktï Kömmandöh.” It works if the objective is to be monumental—the song doesn’t just bury you, it pulverizes you. It’s as monolithic and oppressive as one of Albert Speer’s oversized works of Nazi architecture. I can’t listen to it without seeing Speer’s blueprints for the never-to-be-finished new Berlin, which was to be renamed Germania. Sound like fun? Let’s get down to a brief musical synopsis of what’s in store for you!
It opens with a piano walking in place, then the playing intensifies until Vander comes orating in from stage left like a gaga Goebbels delivering what could be his famed 1943 Total War speech, albeit in hopelessly garbled Teutonogibberish. On and on he goes, really rolling those “r”s as he grows more agitated. He’s followed by some percussion, the band goes into this rolly-poly rhythm, and then he starts declaiming again, like a real madman this time, practically frothing at the mouth. A horn does a bit of blurting, like a terrified bullfrog. The man scares him. The man scares me too.
Then in comes a male choir over the rhythm, doing what sounds to me like a sped-up take on “The Song of the Volga Boatmen.” The female contingent of the choir then enters to provide counterpoint, and if you’re not careful you’ll go into a trance and see spinning swastikas, or maybe that’s just me. But then a melody breaks out, a kind of call and response thing develops, and bingo! Rock opera! And this goes on and on, this part of the choir doing this, that part of the choir doing that, with the men coming on like the Swingin’ Nazi Party Singers to the accompaniment of some heavy drumming and and an organ that makes you think it’s 1967. And occasionally the rhythm picks up to an almost gallop only to slow again and can we have an intermission here? Please?
No!
No intermission for you! Because these singers never take a break, you hope in vain for an instrumental interlude, but the best you’ll get are these totally wacky moments when everybody sings real fast like someone sped the tape up and you can’t help but chuckle. I defy you to keep a straight face. You will chuckle, or chortle perhaps, if you’re the chortling type. Or hyuk, if you’re the hyukking type. I can imagine an ambitious high school choir teacher listening to this alien Godspell and having orgasm after orgasm; what I can’t imagine is how much work Vander put into arranging this vocal free-for-all, this battle royal of voices, voices, and more voices. And it just keeps going, males, females, males and females together, it’s an orgy of voices coupling and uncoupling, a veritable sex tape for opera perverts. Things slow down, things pick up, slow down pick up slow down and so on and so on—I swear there are moments when I think if it doesn’t stop I’ll go mad. And we haven’t even reached the song’s midpoint yet.
When—a brief break! Everybody shuts up! And you get this kind of Tubular Bells thing. But it’s fleeting, too fleeting, because back in come the females, then the males, but at least it’s not as heavy, the vocals aren’t out to crush you, this is the happy part! Until the males come back in sounding very insistent, very pushy, maybe they’re telling the chime to shut up because it’s distracting them from the drums, but that’s impossible because the drums are very heavy indeed. But the important thing is that the damned choir will never shut up, they do everything but shut up, and for the life of me I can’t imagine how anyone listens to this music because it brings them pleasure. For me it’s like this—the insistent drum beat gives me a headache that I’m actually grateful for because it distracts from the sanity-threatening vocals. I’d even welcome the return of Vander’s Venusian Goebbels imitation.
But no! I get better than that! Because suddenly in comes Vander doing some vocalizing that explains what the critics mean when they say he was heavily influenced by the scat-yodeling of American avant-garde jazz singer Leon Thomas. Great falsetto, totally hilarious, unless what we’re hearing is Vander’s spouse Stella doing her thing. But it sounds like Vander to me, doing a great imitation of a musical mouse caught in a trap sending out a long SOS by means of mouse ululation, and if you’re into the albums for laughs this is definitely its high point. Is it worth waiting around for? I would have to say no.
After that the males come back, portentous as ever, followed by the whole melange, doing their thing to a fast beat. Occasionally early Frank Zappa comes to mind, it has that absurdist feel to it, but Zappa would never have taken things this far. He’d have lost his nerve. Perhaps that’s what makes Vander a genius, if that’s what he is. HE NEVER LOSES HIS NERVE. Or his total commitment to taking things as far as they can go while SPARING NO ONE.
Because when the voices finally die down and that piano returns only to have the voices COME BACK (after you thought it was over!) it breaks you. They sound more gospel, here at the end, but this is not gospel music unless gospel music is made in Hell. Then the drums kick in big time, the voices rise to a crescendo, and is it over this time or is it another trick? No, it’s over! You lived! You feel celestial! That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger! You can return to the New York Dolls and never, ever, wonder what Magma sounds like again! Hallelujah!
Magma is proof that not only is there music out there for everybody, there’s music out there for virtually nobody. In Magma’s case that virtually nobody includes John Lydon, who I’m assuming likes them because Vander is an absolutist with a total commitment to the unbearable. I listened to Mekanïk Kommandöh and I’m here to tell the tale. You may want to try it yourself, if you’ve got an hour to set aside–half of it to listen to the album, and the other half to regret having listened to the album. Except Mekanïk Kommandöh isn’t an album, it’s a mass grave for ears. How do you say that in Kobaïan?
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D-
