In a spatiotemporal seizure of linguistic mysophilia, Magma makes all the octoroon odalisques mewl and cant the joys of antilanguage. Trilling in Kobaian mother tongue, Christian Vander frolics through this double-disc live set in an attempt to gather pelt from the crowd with massive lexical pyrotechnics which only succeed in creating a verbal Sargasso Sea where the listener flounders listlessly trying in vain to find out just what the hell’s going on. Incidentally, Kobaian parlance is the patois of Kobaia, a semi-mystical asteroid wherein all the inhabitants have reached a workable state of nirvana, which is really not all that exciting if you’ve ever walked into a teenage saloon on Friday night where alcoholic haze drips from the ceiling and nirvana walks hand in hand with puke. Vander’s whole plot structure, musically and lyrically, revolves around some misguided earthoids who crash land on Kobaia and get a case of the philosophical hots for the Kobaian good life; the nasty terrestrials get malevolent designs on the Kobaians and convince them to return to Earth where they are summarily dumped in the hoosegow. Everything gets complicated and what we end up with is a grand cosmic soap opera, right? Not bad! Then again not exactly Peter Brook’s Orghast frenzies out on the sand dunes.
On their first US release, Mekanik Kommandoh, Magma is actually at its best. Unconcerned with music per se they leap right into schmoosing in Kobaian, relating the pedagogic magniloquence of the prophet Nebehr Gudahtt who tells the earthoids where to get off all in a style resembling high Wagnerian opera and low muzak drone. It’s quite entertaining if you’re snorting monotony in one nostril and adrenaline in the other.
After this they continued their “huh!!” trilogy with Kohntarkosz, yet another excursion into alien acapriccio. Only this time they seem to de-emphasize the Kobaian, because nobody knows what’s going on anyway without some sort of translation chart which is never provided. Especially frantic is “Ork Alarm.”
All this culminating in a live set, which displays the band’s musical vivacity (somewhere between Rundgren’s Utopia and the Sadistic Mika Band from Japan) to no end, and the maenadic vocals of Stella Vander a.k.a. Tauhd Zaia, Christian’s deep growls being subdued by the utter strangeness of the whole affair. In case you don’t think these guys take themselves seriously they even rap between songs in Kobaian, leading me to wonder if they might not be extraterrestrials or a buncha escaped loons from ha-ha city.
If you’re into the post-avant garde blues then you’ll like the music on this record. As for the language-science-fiction bit, the language is useless because everyone knows that French is the best language for rock’n’roll, and the science-fiction is handled more sublimely in Samuel Delaney’s short story, “A Rose for Ecclesiastes.” And if you’re not into either of those things then why the hell are you reading this review? Selah. P.S.--It’s all Greek to me!
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