Magma
K.A

The Magma are without a doubt a concept band, the only one I know. It might be that in the vast field of my ignorance there are others, but I doubt it, I strongly doubt that there is anyone else besides Christian Vander capable of keeping alive, for over three decades, the themes of his representations in what are called the Magmian myths and legends.

I also don't believe that a definition of a concept band exists, so I'll settle for that of a concept album; “it's a record album in which all the songs revolve around a single theme or collectively develop a story.” The entire mythology of Magma revolves around a single theme, the manifestation of different forces that can give an evolutionary impulse to humanity.

This theme, or rather, this purpose, is the aim of the three sagas in which the myths and legends of the French group develop; the planet Kobaia, the Theusz Hamtaahk period, and Köhntarkösz in the Ëmëhntëht-Rê.

Ëmëhntëht-Rê is the name of an ancient pharaoh, in whose tomb, discovered by Köhntarkösz, a revelation will take place, an enlightenment on the secret of immortality.

KA is the first of the three albums in the Ëmëhntëht-Rê cycle, which forms the saga of our explorer and archaeologist Köhntarkösz and should narrate his youth until the discovery of the pharaoh's tomb entrance.

The musical material of KA dates back to 1972 and was published incomplete; a part in the live of '75 and others on Inedits of '77. The project was abandoned to later record Mëkanïk Dëstruktïẁ Kömmandöh in 1973. 1974 is the year of Köhntarkösz, the second album of the cycle, but the first to be published. KA, on the other hand, only saw the light in 2004, to be followed by Ëmëhntëht-Rê in 2009, thus closing the Köhntarkösz saga.

Exactly thirty years after the release of the famous Köhntarkösz, Christian Vander takes on the role of archaeologist of himself, recruiting a team of young musicians to restore and contextualize the pieces without ever altering their original structure. During a year and a half of studio work, KA is realized, with a technically impeccable and musically essential result for any zeuhl lover. Epic, lyrical, choral, progressive, powerful, and delicate, a work that borders on perfection, considering that inevitably, given the premises, a certain spontaneity of execution, characteristic of the band's early phase, had to be sacrificed.

Do not get the wrong idea that understanding the relationships between Magmian mythology and discography is a walk in the park, that flipping through a few web pages is enough to navigate the meanders of its legends. The path is never linear, one event may be followed by another that should have happened before. The creations are not the result of unbound rationality, but of intuition and sensitivity, which sometimes comes from within and other times enters from without, and if this intuition is realized, often even the author himself is not immediately ready to decipher all its secrets. Vander himself states that KA could be the missing link between Köhntarkösz and Mëkanïk Dëstruktïẁ Kömmandöh and that only recently he has come to understand that these scattered pieces here and there tell the story of young Köhntarkösz.

And so only in the 2000s do the Magmian cycles complete, Vander puts order in certain dark points of Magma's discography, giving us these pieces in a new light, of which the most attentive enthusiasts should not have ignored the potential, further confirming the thesis that magma would be the concept band par excellence.

P.S. This piece, so little passionate, was written with the purpose of closing my personal homage to Christian Vander and Magma, in a cycle of three reviews started four years ago.