Is Metal Finally In Its Zeuhl Phase?

Is zeuhl finally making meaningful inroads into metal? There are signs.In an interview with Machine Music’s Ron Ben-Tovim, Ὁπλίτης’s J.L.

discussed the cultishly adored music genre’s impact on his solo band, particularly the project’s new and possibly final album, Π​α​ρ​α​μ​α​ι​ν​ο​μ​έ​ν​η.For J.L., the prime takeaway was to be “free and innovative musically.” J.L.’s inspiration matches well with the founder of zeuhl’s own musical intentions.

Christian Vander, the drummer, singer, and composer of Magma, the French band that’s the genre’s bedrock, has often spoken about his band’s creative independence, a “celestial force” inherent in their musical vision from the outset.Crucially, Vander had his own free and innovative source for pushing past musical constraints.

“1967, the year John Coltrane died, it seemed to me that afterwards, it was as though music had to try to start all over again,” Vander said to Paul Stump in a 1995 profile in The Wire.“Someone had to pick up the pieces, go on searching in the way that he had.

Nobody could match him, but people could pick up the flame.It was almost impossible for anyone to do anything new after Coltrane, but you had to try, try to find other new directions.

So that’s what I tried to do with Magma.” Magma would become an institution, pioneering a new form of genuinely progressive rock that mixed jazz, fusion, and classical into intensely powerful, rhythmically wondrous compositions containing so much musically rich depth and wide-angle, fresh perspectives that they still feel like distinct universes.Vander and band member Klaus Blasquiz would even go the extra mile by inventing the language Kobaïan.

This new vernacular not only contained the word that would give zeuhl its name but made Magma’s gloriously detailed longform space operas regarding refuges from a dying Earth immigrating to the newly discovered planet Kobaïa all the...