The Last Seven Minutes
Attahk (1978, Eurodisc)
Personnel:
Christian Vander (Dëhrstün) – lead vocals, drums, percussion, grand piano, Rhodes piano, Chamberlin
Klaus Blasquiz (Klotz) – vocals
Rene Garber (Stundehr) – vocals
Stella Vander (Thaud) – vocals
Lisa Bois (Sïhnn) – vocals
Tony Russo – trumpet
Jacques Bolognesi – trombone
Benoit Widemann (Kahal) – grand piano, Rhodes piano, Minimoog, Oberheim polyphonic synthesizer
Guy Delacroix – “Earth” bass (Ürgon), “Air” bass (Gorgo)
The title of this post is a phrase that to most, maybe even its own creator, has no meaning – but when shortened to the phrase “Magma”, it references an iconoclastic French band who created a musical movement, their own language, and a vision of the future.
Magma was founded by Christian Vander in 1969, and birthed from the unprecedented musical discovery that year. The seminal sounds of In the Court of the Crimson King, the electrifying Led Zeppelin II, Miles Davis’ sonic expeditions on In a Silent Way, and Trout Mask Replica’s insanity, all in equal parts catalyzed the sound of Magma; an eclectic stew band founder Vander calls “Zeuhl.” Translating to “celestial” in Kobaïan, the constructed language created by the band, the genre is a cosmic soup of breakbeat rhythm, scatsinging in tenor, and choral chanting. These disparate elements are glued together in patchwork surrounding a (usually very cheesy) concept album.
Beside musical aspirations, the band was chiefly spawned of Vander’s dystopic vision of the future. Precipitated by political and ecological ruin, he predicted that Earth would come under the rule of a demagogy, with Earthlings needing to escape and found the planet Kobaïa to ensure humanity’s survival. Naturally, the only place to share this premonition with the world would be in 1970’s debut, the self-titled concept album Magma.
Meeting middling album sales and little critical acclaim, 1971’s sophomore 1001° Centigrades was a broad step from the band’s original style. Less emphasis was placed on melody, and more on the rhythmic nature of military drumming and march songs that would come to inspire the band’s next album, Mekanik Destruktiw Kommandoh. Commonly abbreviated to MDK, this record managed to break into international sales beyond the French avant-garde and fared very well critically. The album cover would come to be the band’s symbol. MDK, by all accounts, looked to be the Magma’s defining work. But when have creatives on the edge of their craft ever stuck to the same sound, especially one bringing breakout success? Later albums brought a sharp movement away from the genre they created, and into a separate niche centered around funk and rhythm tracks. Gospel influence was, of course, pulled as well, leading to the haphazardly named Spiritual (Negro Song). This track is one badly named blemish on Attahk, one of Magma’s lattermost albums, and a personal favorite.
Every track on Attahk fulfills its own role – the elegiac Dondai rounds out the album with its slow balladry, an interesting change of pace in Magma’s repertoire. Maanht, conversely, depicts the clash between a sorcerer and Satan as a James Brown track thrown in a blender, warped in the most enjoyable way. Klaus Blasquiz makes the track his own with demonic groaning over a fat, driving bass rhythm. Synthesizer, trumpets, and harmonizing vocals, come together over a marching drum beat occasionally. I imagine it lends the sorcerer’s demonic battle a sense of grandeur.
Of course, these tracks that form the backend of the album are gems – but none so much as the standout track of Attahk, the ironically named opener The Last Seven Minutes. The song begins in media res, immediately dropping listeners into the thick of its complexity. Two interweaving bass layers and an odd drum timing immediately leave the rest of the instrumentation to catch up. What initially sounds odd coalesces upon the introduction to Christian Vander’s tenor, just odd enough to tie together the frenzied Kraut-inspired beat that has thus far led the song.
If nothing else, the track is always changing; from one minute’s half-time harmonic explosions, to frenetic scat movements, building steam for a sudden change halfway – a funky half-time breakdown into the track’s climax. No musical idea is fully expanded upon, instead used and just as quickly discarded. It’s certainly an acquired taste. Progressive contemporaries like Led Zeppelin released similar epics, such as Kashmir, which took a simple chord and pushed it to its musical limit; Vander was never content to stay in the same place. While nothing fully matures except for the sweeping chorus towards the song’s end, nothing ever grows old either, creating an engaging listening experience.
It is easy to place the jazz influence on Vander. He foregoes classical composition for a structure that evolves as the track ticks forward; it’s a musical equivalent to the winding stream-of-consciousness paragraphs of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway or Joyce’s Ulysses, which were written as their authors wandered the labyrinthine streets of London and Dublin. In Vander’s case, it was Paris.
A building choral coda leads us out of the track, providing a grandeur to the track that evokes previous Magma projects. It’s distinctly less dissonant, a different shade of enjoyable that’s less derived from the surprise of listening and more from the sonic pleasure of the riding on top of the chorus and instrumentation is Vander’s bizarre vocal performance, which can only be described as dolphin sounds? Hilarious, but that hilarity fits the uptempo groove of this section, exuding optimism and an infectious cheesiness. It’s hard not to be charmed – oh, it’s over?
Without finding a conclusive place to end, the track cuts to the sound of flailing percussion, stopping unceremoniously in its building momentum. Just enough for the listener to enjoy both the funky dissonance and melodic swing-timing, while not tiring of either. In this single track, Magma evokes the mortal experience; The Last Seven Minutes haplessly places its listener into the middle of a chaos and only plucks them out when that chaos finally makes sense of itself. Were this any other band, that’d be reaching, but with Magma it’s a possibility.
Jesse Koblin
