{science fiction} – Page 3

Zeuhl Ẁortz!

Kobaïa / Müh (1970), a single by Magma.

1: Zeuhl definitions

Zeuhl is an adjective in Kobaïan, the language written by Christian Vander, drummer and founder of the French band Magma.

Pronunciation: zEU(h)l, while the EU are like a French E with a slight U, and the (h) is a semi-silent letter which is an integrated part of the EU, totalling in a “syllable and a half”. (Prog Archives)

Zeuhl (pronounced [zœl]; lit. ’celestial’) is a music genre that is a hybrid of jazz fusion, symphonic rock and neoclassical music, established in 1969 by the French band Magma. The term comes from Kobaïan, the fictional language created by Magma’s Christian Vander and Klaus Blasquiz for Magma, in which Zeuhl Ẁortz means approximately ‘celestial force’.
[…]
Zeuhl is determined by several characteristic elements. Especially important are dominant rhythm fractions, usually in the form of a pumping bass guitar and sometimes sluggish or flexibly playing drum kits. Slow repetitive structures that serve to build a hypnotic atmosphere are just as prominent as solo passages of high technical finesse. Vocals are often widely present and can consist of polyphonic choral movements, such as Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, or soloistically performed passages with shrill intonation. Zeuhl bands also often have solo guitarists or pianists that usually have a more than accompanying function, especially to emphasize the repetitive patterns. (Wikipedia)

2: The Birth of the Zeuhl

“1967,” he says. “The year John Coltrane died. It seemed to me that afterwards, it was as though music had to try to start all over again. 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. I was a bit young at the time, but…”

Christian Vander describing the birth of Magma to Paul Stump, The Wire, July 1995

3: Zeuhl lists

Weidorje (1978) by Weidorje. Cover art by Klaus Blasquiz.

• Shindig! Magazine: Magma in seven records, and Deeper Underground: the best albums by the Magma family by Warren Hatter.

• Prog Is Alive and Well in the 21st Century: My Favourite Zeuhl Albums of All-Time by Drew Fisher.

• Bandcamp: There is No Prog, Only Zeuhl: A Guide to One of Rock’s Most Imaginative Subgenres by Jim Allen.

• Discogs: Zeuhl lists by Neit and ultimathulerecords.

• Prog Archives: Top 100 Zeuhl.

4: Live Zeuhl

A poster by Jofre Conjota for a concert in Chile demonstrating that Zeuhl can exist without electricity.

• Magma, Hippodrome du Pantin, Paris, 1977 (46 mins; a French TV film that captures one of the 70s lineups in peak form. Includes an almost complete performance of Mekanïk Destruktïẁ Kommandöh.)

• Weidorje, French TV, 1979 (11 mins; Magma offshoot Weidorje were only active for a couple of years, this may be their only TV appearance.)

• Magma, Théâtre Bobino, Paris, 1981 (A complete concert—1 hr 53 mins—from the group’s weird-funk period: Christian Vander leaves his drumkit to sing and rant at the audience, everyone is dressed in spacey glitter outfits, and some of the songs from the Merci album can’t be classed as Zeuhl at all. The musicians are all first rate, however.)

• Magma play Köhntarkösz, 2005 (A fantastic 32-minute performance in a very cramped venue.)

• Collectif PTÄH interprète Magma (12 mins; a Magma covers band playing in a village square.)

5: Cinematic Zeuhl

• Tristan et Iseult (1972): a French feature film with a score by Christian Vander and three members of Magma. The soundtrack album was later incorporated into the Magma official discography as Ẁurdah Ïtah.

• Moi y’en a vouloir des sous (1973): a French satire in which Magma make a brief appearance as a way-out rock group.

6: Lovecraftian Zeuhl

Les Morts Vont Vite (1986) by Shub Niggurath. Cover art: La Ballade de Lénore (1839) by Horace Vernet.

• Liriïk Necronomicus Kanht (1978) by Magma.

• Dagon (1980) by Eskaton.

• La musique d’Erich Zann (1981) by Univers Zero (a Belgian group, originally named Necronomicon, which included former members of an earlier group named Arkham).

• Yog-Sothoth (1986) by Shub Niggurath.

7: Comic Zeuhl

Magma’s Christian Vander and Klaus Blasquiz in a three-page comic strip from Pop & Rock & Colégram (1978), a collection of satirical music-themed pieces by Jean Solé, Alain Dister & Marcel Gotlib.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dune: some French connections
• HR Giger album covers

Weekend links 814

Kull of Atlantis—The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune by Ned Dameron for Kull (1985) by Robert E. Howard. Via.

• Jeremy Allen reviews the latest reissue of The New Worlds Fair by Michael Moorcock and The Deep Fix, describing the album as “a fascinating and quixotic document from the time it was made, deserving to be taken seriously in its own right”.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Short Fiction, a small collection of early stories by Clark Ashton Smith.

• New music: Geometry of Murder: Extra Capsular Extraction Inversions by Earth x Black Noi$e; Live At Nonseq by WNDFRM.

The book is not just loaded with words or tongues. Its also loaded with genres, or more accurately, different modes of literature. And one of the modes I particularly enjoyed this time around is, appropriately, the Weird. In ways long noted on forlorn and unspeakable subreddits, there is a decidedly Lovecraftian dimension to Melville’s Whale, which the Master of Providence did read and enjoy months before writing his game-changing “Call of Cthulhu.” We begin the novel with a sick soul, who may or may not be named after an Old Testament outcast, wandering through a macabre and fetid New England whale-town, following grim portents that lead him on towards a cursed ship doomed to confront a monster who sleeps or at least feeds, and presumably dreams, at the bottom of the sea. And that’s just the first couple of chapters.

Erik Davis on the pleasures of re-reading Moby-Dick, in a piece which makes me want to read the novel again

• At the BFI: Phil Hoad on David Lynch’s efforts to keep making films in an industry resistant to his kind of art.

• Exploration Log 12: Adam Rowe on the best retro science fiction art collections.

• At Public Domain Review: The Nine Birds of Jacques de Fornazeris (1594).

• Winners and finalists for the 2025 Ocean Art Contest.

• Mix of the week: A mix for The Wire by Hilary Woods.

• The Whale (1977) by Electric Light Orchestra | Don’t Kill The Whale (1978) by Yes | School For Whales (1980) by Marc Barreca

Eclipse and Sunscreen

Gobelins, the French school of film animation, has its own YouTube channel where students post a variety of clips showing technical exercises or, as in the case of this pair of films, complete works. Eclipse (directed by Theo Guignard, Noé Lecombre and Hugo Moreno) and Sunscreen (directed by Xinzhi Ma, Yuan Liu, Yufan Chen and Zixiao Yue) are both science-fiction pieces that are also very short, being more like anecdotes than stories. Of the two I prefer Eclipse but both are very accomplished, and a welcome riposte to the ubiquity of the Pixar house style. Stylistic exercises like these are seldom extended to feature-length (or if they are, they get cancelled like Scavengers Reign) but it’s good to see younger animators following in the footsteps of René Laloux.

And speaking of Laloux, the restored Les Maîtres du temps (Time Masters) was released on blu-ray in France last year. As with many French releases there are no English subtitles but it’s good to know it’s available again. I’m waiting now for a high-definition reissue of Gandahar.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Terra Incognita, a film by Adrian Dexter and Pernille Kjaer
• Arzak Rhapsody
• Fracture by Paul and Gaëtan Brizzi
• The Captive, a film by René Laloux

02026

The Basket of Bread (1926) by Salvador Dalí.

Happy new year. 02026? An affectation via the Long Now.

The Cello Player (1926) by Edwin Dickinson.

Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926) by Otto Dix.

The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child before Three Witnesses: André Breton, Paul Eluard and the Artist (1926) by Max Ernst.

The Musician’s Table (1926) by Juan Gris.

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Illustrating Hyperborea

The Book of Hyperborea (1996). Cover art by Robert H. Knox.

“My Hyperborean tales, it seems to me, with their primordial, prehuman and sometimes premundane background and figures, are the closest to the Cthulhu Mythos, but most of them are written in a vein of grotesque humor that differentiates them vastly.” — Clark Ashton Smith

Since re-reading Clark Ashton Smith’s The Tale of Satampra Zeiros I’ve been revisiting more of Smith’s stories set in the lost world of Hyperborea. And having put together a post some years ago that gathered all the original illustrations for Smith’s Zothique cycle, I thought I’d try and do the same for another of his story series. As I noted in the earlier post, we’re fortunate today that it’s so easy to see illustrations that in the past would have been impossible to find unless you owned (or had access to) a huge collection of pulp magazines. Pulp illustrations aren’t always very good—in the case of the early issues of Weird Tales, they’re frequently amateurish—but those that illustrate new fiction for the first time are historically important if nothing else.

Lost Worlds: Volume 1 (1974). Cover art by Bruce Pennington. Lost Worlds was a single-volume collection published by Arkham House (USA) and Neville Spearman (UK). The Panther paperback covers by Bruce Pennington could easily be used on other books but these were the first Smith volumes I owned.

The first Hyperborea stories were among Smith’s earliest prose fantasies, owing something to Lord Dunsany on the one hand (HP Lovecraft detected a Dunsanian quality), and the writers of antiquity on the other, the name “Hyperborea” (“Behind the North Wind”) being borrowed from the Greeks. The northern location is about the only feature of the continent that the Greek writers would recognise, Smith’s world being a temperate pre-Ice Age realm of mountains and verdant jungles. Dinosaurs and megafauna share the lands with human inhabitants for whom sorcery is a common practice. As with Zothique, the cycle was an influential one. Lin Carter in the introduction to his Ballantine collection, Hyperborea (1971), suggests that the name of the continent might have prompted Robert E. Howard to set his Conan stories in “the Hyborean Age”. This could be the case: Howard and Smith were writing for the same publications, and the first Conan story was published in Weird Tales shortly after The Tale of Satampra Zeiros; but Howard was also reading the Greeks as well. A more substantial influence may be found in Fritz Leiber’s Nehwon, a world in which aspects of Hyperborea and Zothique are combined. Sword and sorcery begins “behind the North Wind”, in other words, although there’s very little sword-play in Smith’s fiction, that was Leiber and Howard’s department.

Lost Worlds: Volume 2 (1974). Cover art by Bruce Pennington.

The original Hyperborea illustrations are fewer than those for Zothique. As with the later cycle, several of the stories are unillustrated, while others were given lacklustre artwork. In the earlier post I followed the story order chosen by Lin Carter which attempted to contrive an internal chronology for the cycle. Carter did the same with his Hyperborea collection so I’ve followed his example once again. Later collections, like Will Murray’s Book of Hyperborea, tend to order the stories by publication date.

The Seven Geases, Weird Tales, October 1934.

An illustration of Tsathoggua by Smith himself. The toad-god turns up in person in this story.

The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan, Weird Tales, June 1932.

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