MAGMA
VENUE ISLINGTON ASSEMBLY HALL, LONDON
STARDATE 04/10/2019
Whether it’s down to their inclusion on the Roadburn line-up five years ago at the behest of Opeth’s Mikael Åkerfeldt or just because music this far out on a limb will always remain timeless, Magma’s return to the UK has attracted a broad, all-ages crowd. Seasoned fanatics (including Steve Davis, obviously) rub shoulders with metallers, stoner rockers and 20-somethings in the aptly ornate venue. But no matter how au fait you think you are when it comes to Magma, you can never be sure quite where they’re going to take you.
Tonight is something of a ‘greatest hits’ set, but so sprawling yet so immersive is the universe they’ve created that even on familiar ground you’ll find new details to remap your bearings and rewire your senses. Theirs is a world a few degrees off tilt from our own, one that you need to shift your centre of consciousness, like staring into a stereogram to fully embrace, before it reveals itself in full, revelatory 3D.
When Magma do appear, the response is rapturous, all of us fully signed-up residents with no return ticket. The band themselves span generations too, the core members – band founder and drummer/vocalist Christian Vander, and vocalists Hervé Aknin, Stella Vander and Isabelle Feuillebois – flanked by a relatively new crop of musicians, all engaged in what seems to be an act of perpetual regeneration.
There’s also something inherently ecstatic about Magma’s music. Their madscientist cross-pollination of prog and jazz draws from the celestial futurism of Miles Davis circa Bitches Brew and Sun Ra Arkestra, but also carries the same strain of whimsical yet lysergic Gallic sci-fi that runs through René Laloux’s bizarre animated movie, Fantastic Planet and Moebius’ wild, world-building graphic novels. The result is something that sounds like an ode to an intergalactic emperor, or a musical, but on Mars. The opening Theusz Hamtaahk starts off on a vocal chant courtesy of Aknin, proceeds through disorientated dramatic sequences like it’s soundtracking a surreal, urban chase scene, all driven by Christian’s intricate, ever-shifting drum rhythms to ever higher states of lunacy, Stella’s vocals at various points even mimicking a Theramin. The three main vocalists take up different positions onstage, facing each other then lined up in the corner like backing singers, as if they were antennae tuning into the clearest, interstellar frequency.
Christian Vander’s own vocals are still a gloriously rich vibrato, guiding us through Mekanïk Destruktïw Kommandöh, wherein that groove-laden pulse rises up like a sequence of DNA being reactivated, and a closing De Futura, with its tempo-stretching bassline like a particularly thorough alien probe, helps to make two hours seem like both no time at all and the entire span of cosmic existence.
“TWO HOURS SEEMS LIKE BOTH NO TIME AT ALL AND THE ENTIRE SPAN OF COSMIC
EXISTENCE.”