Lovecraft, the weird fiction prophet, who has always had an army of fans but had little or no honour in his own time or for many decades after his death, the good thing about clueless critics is they eventually die, leaving room for new ones to move in and hopefully correct some of these obvious mistakes. To paraphrase Michel Houellebecq from Against The World, Against Life talking about H.P. Despite the utter weirdness* of their music, once you've entered willingly into their world, you realise that they have an almost instantaneously recognisable sound, which, taken as a whole doesn't really sound like anything else, (bar maybe other acolyte groups who occupied a place in their own Zeuhl universe). Listing fellow travellers and influences is just the age-honoured journalistic practice of flailing about trying to nail lightning to the wall while trying to fulfil a word count.

In short they certainly don't sound like ELP.Īnd when I say 'sounded much more like', I'm pushing the term past breaking point here because they don't really sound like anyone other than Magma. Certainly, it's not a stretch to see why so many post punks such as Charles Hayward and John Lydon were huge fans. But for a band that were so compositionally advanced, they were adept at producing primordially insistent and hypnotic rhythms. And, they have, at various times, sounded much more like fans of Funkadelic, the Staples Singers, Black Sabbath, Stravinksky, Heldon, Soft Machine and Carl Orff than you would perhaps expect, even though you could admittedly also invoke the names of Van Der Graaf Generator, John McLaughlin, Weather Report and Aphrodite's Child, when talking about them. Their origin myth is that they were formed in 1969, not radicalised by the previous year's riots, but in order to fill the stunning void left in popular culture by the death of John Coltrane.

Project magma myth