Artist: Magma
Label: Seventh Records
Released: 1971
Length: 41:54
Rating: 4.2/5
After a superb debut that shook up the music world and introduced us to a brand-new genre (though not yet fully formed), Magma came back just a year later with their second studio outing, titled 1001° Centigrades.
The lineup mostly stayed the same. The biggest splash was the arrival of promising wind player Jeff Seffer, a Frenchman with Hungarian roots. The guitarist’s departure mattered too, since it meant Magma were now completely guitar-free and lost a good chunk of the rock from their sound.
On this album Magma are still locked in their fictional world, through which mastermind Christian Vander goes after the foundations of human society: its destructiveness, vengefulness, aggression, malice and plenty more. Vander once again warns us about “Wurdah Itah”, the dead earth, and in doing so shows us the mental state of most people on our planet.
Musically, too, Magma hadn’t yet drifted away from the vision of the debut. Most of the music still rests on jazz rock, with plenty of classical influence (though noticeably less than later), opera, Eastern European folk and assorted marches, which were partly to blame for Magma getting slapped with the label of a Nazi (or sometimes fascist) band. All of that was of course unjustified; Magma were simply a mix of every influence imaginable. How could music built on jazz even be Nazi?
The album has three compositions. The first is the work of the band’s boss, Christian Vander, and shows how far he’d come as a composer. With Rïah Sahïltaahk he created one of his strangest and finest pieces. The other two tracks matter less in Magma’s catalog, though even they have a bright spot or two.
Rïah starts off slowly with a jazzy rhythm and Blasquiz’s vocals. You soon notice it won’t stay in that calm groove for long, since Vander keeps throwing in surges of tempo that are wildly unpredictable. These swaps end when the first march kicks in, with piano and drums dominating, plus the vocals of course. The piece gets even wilder when we hear Vander himself on vocals for the first time. Melodies come at you like on a conveyor belt. Sometimes Rïah Sahïltaahk even feels like it’s made up of a hundred smaller songs rather than one long piece. That might be the biggest criticism too: the sections sometimes seem disconnected and the transitions between them are rough at times. Personally, I find that wonderful, since this way of composing is so rare and still feels fresh today. The tempo then drops a bit, but Vander doesn’t let us rest. On 1001° Centigrades he was still pretty smitten with marches and Eastern European folk, which you notice pretty quickly. The sections still follow one another abruptly, from ultra-dynamic to slow and jazzy, to almost ambient, to classical parts, marches… Later we also get some of Vander’s vocal outbursts (screaming), which we’re used to from the first record. After all the dynamic twists, the composition ends a bit unceremoniously, with a slow, ever-quieter finish.
“Iss” Lanseï Doïa ” is the composition by Teddy Lasry, who was a composer on the debut too, but left a much bigger mark there, at least as far as I’m concerned. This one is a lot more boring than I’d have expected from Lasry. The start is pure jazz, but some of the middle sections are still pretty interesting, with assorted choir chants and Blasquiz’s vocal excesses.
Cahen’s creation is a notch worse than Lasry’s, but Cahen was clearly still finding himself here. He showed far more on the albums by Zao, while here you can tell he doesn’t quite know what he wants to do. In the end the piece comes off as pleasant enough jazz, but without any big surprises it just sounds pretty pitiful. If you want to hear interesting, good jazz, look elsewhere, because this is quite generic and uninspired.
Rïah Sahïltaahk is undoubtedly one of Magma’s greatest masterpieces, but the album itself loses quite a bit in quality because of the other two tracks. Both “Iss” and “Ki” are solid jazz pieces, but Vander’s composition is incomparably better. Lasry and Cahen made more straightforward jazz compositions, with fewer surprises. It’s all wrapped in a zeuhl wrapper (especially the vocals), but it’s nothing special.
This record is the last studio album counted as part of Magma’s “first wave”. Big lineup changes followed. Most notable was the departure of “Faton” Cahen and Jeff Seffer, who later formed their own vision of zeuhl in Zao. Magma also went through a rebirth musically: on Mekanik Destruktiw Kommandoh the sound is completely different, steadily moving away from jazz and ever closer to Orff’s operatic style and minimalist classical music. Jazz rock elements were always present in Magma and probably always will be, but after this album they were greatly toned down.
1001° Centigrades is a half-and-half album. The first half is superb and gives us one of Vander’s best creations ever. In that sense Magma even take a step beyond the magnificent debut. But what good is that when the second half of the album, courtesy of Lasry and Cahen, is slower and unadventurous? Don’t get me wrong, both compositions are perfectly solid jazz, but for me Magma has to be something different. The album is undoubtedly worth buying for Rïah Sahïltaahk alone, but the weaker second half means that, as far as I’m concerned, this is the worst studio album (yes, even worse than Merci) in Magma’s history.
Line-up
Christian Vander – vocals, drums, percussion
Klaus Blasquiz – vocals, percussion
François Cahen – piano
Francis Moze – bass
Teddy Lasry – clarinet, saxophone, flute, voice
Jeff Seffer – saxophone, bass clarinet
Louis Toesca – trumpet
Production
Louis Sarkissian
Track list
1. Rïah Sahïltaahk (21:45)
2. “Iss” Lanseï Doïa (11:46)
3. Ki Ãahl Ö Lïahk (8:23)
