Christian Vander
Offering I - II

The offering, the sacrifice; giving to God or some spiritual force something dear, of value, whose absence creates a sense of painful detachment, an act that represents a moment of renewal and inner growth, a new beginning or a new end.

Chistian Vander offers his drums as a holocaust while praying in a mysterious and fascinating hymn; he renounces Zeuhl as the ultimate goal of the Magma quest in favor of a deeply personal soul music; he leaves behind the intricate universe of Vanderian myths and legends to embark on a more intimate spiritual path.

This act is passed down to posterity through a recording etched on a vinyl medium called Offering I&II. Some consider it a project and others a solo work. Undeniably, numbers one and two suggest something that begins, and indeed we are in the first record of a cycle of three, just as Vander's mind is known to plan.

To understand the musical genesis of Offering I&II, one must take a step back ten years, through another crucial moment, a sort of rebirth when, while Magma reaches one of its peaks with an extraordinarily powerful live machine (Hhaï), Vander finds himself exhausted. From '69 to '76, it was seven years of hard work, five records under the name Magma among various lineup changes, some parallel projects, many concerts, an interspatial journey to the planet Kobaia, the complex mission to spread the message of the prophet Nebehr Gudahtt and the exploration of ancient Egyptian pyramids with Köhntarkösz in search of the secret of the pharaoh Ëmëhntëht-Rê's immortality. Vander needs to pause for a while and informs the other musicians, during a tour, that he wants to return to Paris; some will try in vain to dissuade him.

A few months later, however, a pivotal event occurs; his "right-hand man" Jannick Top calls him, De Futura after years of gestation is finally ready and Vander decides to return to work and write some form-fitting pieces to accompany Top's composition. It is in the piece Üdü ?üdü, opening the album of the same name, where we find the first hint of the path that will lead to Offering. This is an excerpt of improvisations with voice and piano that Vander usually does at home; he himself declares that its form could be extended for more than twenty minutes.

After the album Üdü ?üdü, the purest Zeuhl takes flight aboard the spaceship Weidorje, while Vander works to strengthen the groove in Attahk (1978), where in the piece Spiritual we find the second link of the path traced so far; a quest inspired by Afro-American religious music, a quest that would be fully developed in the last Magma, Merci (1984), which by then was no longer Magma.

Offering I&II (1986) greets us with the voice of Stella Vander, an inseparable travel companion, as if to welcome us to the unique world of Christian before beginning his ritual of purification from his frustrations towards humanity (Earth), to take an eighteen-minute flight towards joy (Joïa) chanting a mantra accompanied by percussion and the piano in two transcendent chords. The journey then returns to a more physical plane; the body reacts to the vibratory stimuli of C'est Pour Nous, and our vocal cords even find the courage to stammer along with Christian, who appears so ecstatic as to be irresistible. Love In The Darkness, the album's only subdued moment, taken from Merci, bears witness to the artificial world of the eighties. And then again and again, in other magical moments where it is worth paying tribute to the piano companion in an absolutely Debussian manner.

The drums burn. It is the representation of a planetary system, planets of skins and cymbals of stars, the Vanderian universe crumbles only to recombine like a hologram impressed in his being and revealed by the voice that releases from the depths a new universe different from the one we are accustomed to imagine.

Christian Vander's singing style is surprising and fascinating, the Kobaïan is dissolved in its essence, returning to what it was before being devised, a form with purely musical content that draws a deeper and more sensitive communication than the use of any language whose semantic and cognitive functionality limits its musical expressivity.

Christian Vander, a man, a legend.