“The Last Seven Minutes” by Magma
From the 1978 album Attahk
There’s not much I can say about this to convince the uninitiated or to discourage the fan. Pretty much the only thing I can say is this: the guy I shoved in Chicago would be happy.
You see, as I mentioned before, I saw Magma live at a tiny club in Chicago in 1999. It was an amazing show, and I spent most of it standing about 5 feet from Christian Vander. (Yeah, it was that small.) The one downside was the exceptionally drunken lunkhead standing directly in front of me, who, after every song, raised his beer-holding hands up in the air and alternated screaming “WOOOOOOOO!!!!” and “The Last Seven Minutes!!!!”
I thought he was nuts for asking for that. There’s no way they’re going to play something from Attahk, I thought. And, on that night at least, I was right. But he kept right on screaming, and stumbling backwards into me, until finally I got fed up and shoved him as hard as I could. Luckily an altercation did not ensue… and for the rest of the show I had a clear foot-and-a-half radius of bare floor around me at all times. It was the one and only marginally badass moment of my entire life… helped, I am sure, by his level of inebriation.
Where to begin when discussing Magma? I used to have my own Magma fan site back in the early days of the web, but right now a quick look at Wikipedia is a good place to start.
I saw Magma live in Chicago in 1999 at a tiny club where I was less than 5 feet from the stage, within sweat-spray distance of Christian Vander, and it was incredible (sweat notwithstanding). Christian Vander has, over the years, become a jazz fusion elder statesman in France, kind of like Miles Davis was in his later years — the ultimate test of an up-and-coming musician is to be selected to join his band. So when I saw Magma, it was not really the old Magma; only Christian and his wife Stella Vander remained. But the young musicians he surrounded himself with carried on the spirit of the earlier lineups and played with a ferocity worthy of the material they were tasked with performing.
This video is quite possibly my favorite find yet on YouTube (first discussed here). It’s from 2006, and features much of the same lineup I saw seven years earlier, but with the welcome return of two ’70s Magma legends: vocalist Klaus Blasquiz and bassist Jannick Top. It is, quite simply, awe-inspiring. Enjoy.
By this point, I am sure a few people who are reading this might be wondering, “Is that the best you can do?” The music I’m featuring is too mainstream, too tame, too well-known. One of the pitfalls of being a prog fan is, at some point, you lose all sense of perspective. There is an addictive quality to the madness inherent in some prog music — the more you have, the more you crave — and the 21st century Japanese Zeuhl (if you don’t know what Zeuhl is, you’d best stop now) band Koenjihyakkei is about the purest, most highly-concentrated hit you can score.
I own Angherr Shisspa on CD. I bought it on Amazon, not having heard a single note by the band, but based solely on the comparisons to Magma and the superlative customer reviews. I realized later that those reviewers were all strung-out junkies, trying to lure my recovering ass back into the habit. It didn’t quite work. I am dazzled by Koenjihyakkei’s musicianship, but I just can’t bring myself to really like their music. Unlike Magma, whose insanity seems focused towards a clear purpose (though that purpose might be obscured), it seems like Koenjihyakkei is weird just for the sake of being weird.
I’m not going to pretend this is easy listening, and it’s not my favorite work by Magma by any stretch of the imagination. (This is more my style.) But as alien as Magma’s invented language and futuristic dystopian concept are, nothing could be so alien to my brain in the United States, in 2009, as France in 1970, where a band like this could get on TV lip syncing a song like this. Even in 1970, there’s no way Dick Clark would have welcomed Christian Vander and company to the stage of American Bandstand.
