Merci by Bobby Jewell

After performing their Köhntarkösz LP at Cadogan Hall London in May 2015 - Magma's Stella Vander commented that the album (released in 1974) was 'ahead of it's time... still is'.

Watching Magma live it's hard to disagree with that statement, same with listening to their records it's an immersive mix of musicianship, experimentation and Kobaïan - as Jason Ankeny for AllMusic describes them, they are 'perhaps the ultimate progressive rock group'.

For this album I sampled a Magma LP track for track, presented in a new order with the aim of creating something unprogressive, slow and melodic. Not as a re-appropriation of their own music but instead to show the variety and complexity within it - just as say every frame is a picture within cubist paintings, every moment in Magma's music holds within it a new world of sound.

I chose the rogue 1984 album Merci, as it's opener Call From the Dark was one of the first tracks I ever sampled and has always been a soft spot of mine. Each track here is made entirely from that album, apart from the inclusion of audio from a Christian Vander interview*. His voice being essential to any experience of the band.

Admittedly, I did start this project with the aim of using clear, straight samples that could easily be linked back to the original. But through desperation and laziness I cut corners and ended up time-stretching out microseconds of some songs into individual notes and duplicated certain tracks I found to be more malleable than others.

The ends come close to justifying the means, it's just not as linear a path as I'd hoped for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merci_%28Magma_album%29
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liq0IRPJ9rs