July 22, 2005 Los Angeles Times
July 22, 2005

The concentration is especially high in children, a national study says. But experts aren’t sure what the health effects are.

By Marla Cone, Times Staff Writer

In the largest study of chemical exposure ever conducted on human beings, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday that most American children and adults were carrying in their bodies dozens of pesticides and toxic compounds used in consumer products, many of them linked to potential health threats.

The report documented bigger doses in children than in adults of many chemicals, including some pyrethroids, which are in virtually every household pesticide, and phthalates, which are found in nail polish and other beauty products as well as in soft plastics.

The CDC’s director, Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, called the national exposure report ó the third in an assessment that is released biennially ó a breakthrough that would help public health officials home in on the most important compounds to which Americans are routinely exposed.

The latest installment, which looked for 148 toxic compounds in the urine and blood of about 2,400 people age 6 and older in 2000 and 2001, is “the largest and most comprehensive report of its kind ever released anywhere by anyone,” Gerberding said. Findings were broken down by age group and race.

At Thursday’s news conference, CDC officials emphasized the good news: Steep declines were found in children’s exposure to lead and secondhand cigarette smoke.

Lead levels in children have dropped significantly over several years, which Gerberding called an “astonishing public health achievement” attributable largely to its removal from gasoline and paint.

About 1.6% of young children tested from 1999 to 2002 had elevated levels of lead, which could lower their intelligence and damage their brains, compared with 88.2% in the late 1970s and 4.4% in the early 1990s.

But the discovery of more than 100 other substances in humans, particularly children, distressed environmental health experts.

“The report in general shows that people ó kids and adults ó are exposed to things that aren’t intended to be in their body,” said Dr. Jerome A. Paulson, an associate professor of pediatrics at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences who specializes in children’s environmental health. “In and of itself, that is a concern. Whether it’s harmful or not we can’t tell from this particular study.”

The new data in the 475-page report reveal how “we have fouled our own nest,” Paulson said. “We contaminated the environment sufficiently that there are measurable amounts of potentially toxic substances in people ó kids and adults.”

The CDC did not try to gauge the health threat the chemicals might pose. A measurable amount of a compound in a person’s body does not mean it causes disease or other damage, the agency noted.

For many compounds in the report, experts have little information on what amounts may be harmful or what they may do in combination.

“We are really at the beginning of a very complicated journey to understand the thousands of substances we are exposed to,” said Thomas Burke, associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The discovery of pyrethroids in most people is especially important, as no one had looked for them in the human body before. Pyrethroids are synthetic versions of natural compounds found in flowers, and they have been considered safer than older pesticides, such as DDT and chlordane, that build up in the environment and have been banned in the United States.

But in high doses, pyrethroids are toxic to the nervous system. They are the second most common class of pesticides that result in poisoning. At low doses, they might alter hormones. The compounds are used in large volumes in farm and household pesticides and are sprayed by public agencies to kill mosquitoes.

Pyrethroids “were a step forward [from DDT and other banned pesticides], but now we’re beginning to understand that while they don’t persist in the environment, many of us are exposed,” Burke said. “We don’t quite know what those levels mean.”

Eleven of 12 phthalates tested were higher in children than adults. All of the phthalates but one are used in fragrances. In animal tests, and in one recent study of human babies, some of the compounds have been shown to alter male reproductive organs or to feminize hormones.

Representatives of the chemical and pesticide industries praised the study, saying that human biomonitoring is the best available tool to measure exposure. They echoed the CDC in saying that discovery of the chemicals in the human body did not automatically mean they posed a threat.

The report demonstrates “that exposure to these man-made and natural substances is extremely low,” said American Chemistry Council spokesman Chris VandenHeuvel.

The CDC’s Gerberding said that “for the vast majority” of the 148 chemicals in the report, “we have no evidence of health effects.”

Many toxicologists and environmental scientists disagree.

Studies of animals, and in some cases people, suggest that most of the compounds can affect the brain, hormones, reproductive system or the immune system, or that they are linked to cancer. “These are some bad actors,” Burke said.

Many of the compounds have not been studied sufficiently to know what happens with chronic exposure to low doses. “No evidence of health effects does not imply that they are not harmful,” Paulson said. “It just means we don’t know one way or another.”

Environmental groups have called for U.S. law to require chemical companies to test industrial compounds more comprehensively, a proposal similar to one that the European Parliament is to debate in the fall.

The evidence that many contaminants amass in children more than in adults could mean that they are exposed to larger amounts ó perhaps from crawling, breathing more rapidly or putting items in their mouths ó or that their bodies are less able to cope with or metabolize them.

In the womb and in the first two years after birth, children undergo extraordinary cell growth, from brain neurons to immune cells, so there are more opportunities for toxic compounds to disrupt the cells, Paulson said. Animal tests show that fetuses and newborns are the most susceptible to harm from many chemicals.

In the CDC study, one of every 18 women of childbearing age, or 5.7%, had mercury that exceeded the level that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency deemed safe to a developing fetus.

Tests on schoolchildren show that mercury exposure in the womb can lower IQs, with memory and vocabulary particularly impaired.

The CDC plans to expand the national chemical report to more than 300 compounds in two years and about 500 in four years. An estimated 80,000 chemicals are in commercial use today.

COURTESY ERIC BLUHM!

“What is Henderson’s Relish?

“Though similar in appearance to a Worcestershire sauce, Hendersonís Relish is unique in its aroma and flavour. It can be used both as a sauce on meat dishes, pies, fish, chips and as a cooking ingredient in casseroles, pasta dishes, soups and marinades.†

“Unlike other comparable sauces, the relish is also suitable for vegetarians.

“The special mix of spices are blended together with our secret recipe and a special sauce is made. The way in which the sauce is blended is still a closely guarded secret and at least once a year a rumour sweeps Sheffield that the owner is retiring and taking the secret recipe with him. Upon hearing this supermarket shelves are cleared as people stock up on their favourite sauce. Fortunately all these rumours are unfounded and Hendersons is going as strong as ever.”

Scientists worried by riot control ray gun
Wed Jul 20, 2:03 PM ET

LONDON (Reuters) – Scientists are questioning the safety of a Star Wars-style riot control ray gun due to be deployed in Iraq next year.

The Active Denial System weapon, classified as “less lethal” by the Pentagon, fires a 95-gigahertz microwave beam at rioters to cause heating and intolerable pain in less than five seconds.

The idea is people caught in the beam will rapidly try to move out of it and therefore break up the crowd.

But New Scientist magazine reported on Wednesday that during tests carried out at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, participants playing the part of rioters were told to remove glasses and contact lenses to protect their eyes.

In another test they were also told to remove metal objects like coins from their clothing to avoid local hot spots developing on their skin.

“What happens if someone in a crowd is unable for whatever reason to move away from the beam,” asked Neil Davison, coordinator of the non-lethal weapons research project at Britain’s Bradford University.

“How do you ensure that the dose doesn’t cross the threshold for permanent damage? Does the weapon cut out to prevent overexposure?,” he added.

The magazine said a vehicle-mounted version of the weapon named Sheriff was scheduled for service in Iraq in 2006 and that U.S. Marines and police were both working on portable versions.

The Guardian, July 20

In Machete Season, 10 Hutu men recall how they enjoyed slaughtering their neighbours with machetes and clubs – and, six years after the Rwanda genocide, feel no guilt

Suzy Hansen
Wednesday July 20, 2005

The 1994 Rwandan genocide was ignored by most of the world as it raged on. But in years since, the horrific event that claimed 800,000 deaths has garnered worldwide attention, thanks to numerous books and documentaries, and even a Hollywood film. Philip Gourevitch’s masterly We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, based on his dispatches from Rwanda for the New Yorker, became an award-winning bestseller. Romeo Dallaire, the United Nations commander stationed in Rwanda at the time, recently participated in a documentary based on his own memoir, Shake Hands With the Devil. And last year, the tragedy of the slaughter was brought to the big screen in the surprisingly good Hotel Rwanda, a film starring Don Cheadle that managed to grab three Oscar nominations.

These renderings of the genocide include many unfathomable images of men furiously hacking at other men, of whole communities decimated while seeking refuge in church, of bloated, days-old bodies choking the country’s rivers. As by now most people know, in Rwanda, the vast majority of the Hutu population participated in the mass killing of their fellow Tutsi countrymen (as well as Hutu moderates) in only 100 days, a little more than three months. The killing was done without the efficient aid of gas chambers or bombs or machine guns; instead, most of the murders were of the one-on-one sort – a very personal, laborious killing in which many, many people willingly, almost enthusiastically, took part.

Although western writers and artists have attempted, and will continue attempting, to translate the reality of a mass extermination, it’s a nearly impossible task. They succeed in many ways, but what they can’t quite get across is technical: what is it like for one entire population to kill another, day after day, for an entire season of the year? Did the men go to work too? Did they make love at night, and wake up and kill in the morning? Did they read books, get drunk, tell bedtime stories – all after a day’s kill? Did they cry?

Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak, the second book on Rwanda by French journalist Jean Hatzfeld, attempts to answer some of these questions, and gives this madness a shocking sort of order. Hatzfeld interviewed 10 Hutus six years after the genocide, while the men served time in jail. These Hutus were from the rural Nyamata district (population 119,000), which includes a small town and 14 surrounding hills (Rwanda is lush and mountainous) split almost half between Hutus and Tutsis. Beginning in April 1994, within six weeks, five out of every six Tutsis in Nyamata were killed.

The 10 men, ranging from 20 to 62 years of age, hailed from these hills, where most of them were farmers. “None of them has ever quarrelled with his Tutsi neighbors over land, crops, damage, and women,” Hatzfeld writes. In fact, they lived next door to Tutsis, played soccer with them, went to church with them. “But these 10 banded together,” Hatzfeld explains, “because of the proximity of their fields, their patronage of a cabaret, and their natural affinities and shared concerns”. Hatzfeld gives the reader a basic sense of who the men are – the little detail already provided in this review – but he wisely lets the men talk first before proffering their proper biographies. “That bunch was famous on the hill for carousing and tomfoolery,” said Clementine, a local Hutu who is married to a Tutsi. “Those fellows did not seem so bad.”

The Rwandan genocide officially began after the death of President JuvÈnal Habyarimana, a Hutu, whose plane was mysteriously shot down on April 6 1994. The death of the president was the excuse the Hutu extremists needed to begin the killing that they had long planned. (Obviously, Rwandan history is ever more complicated: Hutu extremists had long been paranoid about Tutsi power; at various times Tutsis had suffered, and been slaughtered, at the hands of Hutus; a group of exiled Tutsis organised the Rwandan Patriotic Front, with whom Habyarimana had signed peace accords in 1993. Later, the RPF would enter Rwanda and stop the genocide.)

Hatzfeld’s band of ordinary Hutus, incited by extremists broadcasting on the radio, gathered together, singing songs and screwing around, and then headed down to the marshes where they believed the Tutsis were hiding. The new killers indeed bonded immediately: “We gathered into teams on the soccer field and went out hunting as kindred spirits,” said Ignace. “We had to work fast, and we got no time off, especially not Sundays – we had to finish up,” said Elie. “We cancelled all ceremonies. Everyone was hired at the same level for a single job – to crush all the cockroaches.”

The most difficult part of all of this is to comprehend the moment when men become killers. The Hutus claimed not to have been forced to kill, though they did fear the consequences of not joining in at the beginning. By the time of the interviews, killing strikes them as quite normal. It’s not as though their first kill is particularly memorable. Still, they attempt to recall it:

Fulgence: “First I cracked an old mama’s head with a club.”
Alphonse: “I was quite surprised by the speed of death, and also by the softness of the blow.”

Adalbert didn’t remember the “precise details” of his first kill: “Therefore the true first time worth telling from a lasting memory, for me, is when I killed two children, April 17.”

They meditate on murder like this throughout the book.

Elie: “The club is more crushing, but the machete is more natural. The Rwandan is accustomed to the machete from childhood. Grab a machete – that is what we do every morning.”
Alphonse: “Saving the babies, that was not practical. They were whacked against walls and trees or they were cut right away.”

Indeed, especially for farmers, slicing at things was routine. The men use the word “cut” to describe their murders, as if what they did was akin to dragging a paper edge across a thumb. Obviously it’s a callous way of distancing themselves from their deeds, but it also signals the parallel they saw between hacking Tutsis and working in the fields.

Yet, there were differences. “Killing was a demanding but more gratifying activity,” said Pio. “The proof: none ever asked permission to go clear brush on his field, not even for a half-day.” Soon it became addictive, and there were rewards: “We could no longer stop ourselves from wielding the machete, it brought us so much profit.” The looting that accompanied the killing was dazzling for the poor farmers, and it offered a way for the women to pitch in (though some women and children did kill). They stole everything – some even grabbed the bloodstained clothing of the dead. “If you went home empty-handed, you might even be scolded by your wife or your children,” one man said. And despite knowing that their husbands were out raping women and then killing them, most wives still made love to their husbands at night.

Many men insisted that this life – the one where they woke up and killed people all day – was a better one. “Man can get used to killing, if he kills on and on,” said Alphonse. Fulgence went one step further: “The more we saw people die, the less we thought about their lives, the less we talked about their deaths. And the more we got used to enjoying it.”

As the killing went on, the men became intoxicated by the idea of “finishing the job”. The idea appears to have been that when it was all over, the Tutsis would be gone, and there would be no reminder of them. So the drive to kill every last Tutsi became more ferocious. In Nyamata not one bond of friendship spared a life, writes Hatzfeld; unlike in Nazi Germany, for example, Tutsis found “not a single escape network”.

But there was another key component to the genocide’s ferocity: no one was watching. There is nothing so damning in Machete Season as when the men speak of the “whites”. One man suggests that the idea of genocide germinated in 1959, when Hutus massacred many Tutsis “without being punished”. And, in 1994, Hutu extremists gradually realised that the world was averting its eyes from the present atrocities as well. “All the important people turned their backs on our killings,” said Elie. “The blue helmets, the Belgians, the white directors, the black presidents, the humanitarian people and the international cameramen, the priests and the bishops and finally even God … We were all abandoned by all words of rebuke.” Pancrace agreed: “Killing is very discouraging if you yourself must decide to do it … but if you must obey the orders of the authorities … if you see that the killing will be total and without disastrous consequences for yourself, you feel soothed and reassured.”

These were ordinary men, for sure. And ordinary men would have feared the punishment of others; as soon as the west pulled out of Rwanda they knew they were free to kill. It’s clear that if some force had been monitoring them, at least some of the motivation to kill would have withered away. Fittingly, one of the chapters in the book is titled A Sealed Chamber.

Perhaps not surprisingly, because of this long absence of condemnation, the men have no regrets. “I want to make clear that from the first gentleman I killed to the last, I was not sorry about a single one,” said Leopord. Hatzfeld notes in amazement that the killers speak in monotone and “never allow themselves to be overwhelmed by anything”. During the men’s seven years in prison, they knew of not one Hutu suicide. If they were depressed, it was only because they were locked up. “Aside from the anguish of my years in prison,” said Pancrace, “I do not see my life as harmed by all these regrettable events.” The unfortunately candid Elie takes a stab at remorse: “In prison and on the hills, everyone is obviously sorry. But most of the killers are sorry they didn’t finish the job.”

Machete Season is realistic and, above all else, terrifying; Hatzfeld brilliantly organises his subjects’ stories for maximum effect. His method captures the rhythm of a genocide – the cold, workmanlike, fierce nature of its repetition. The book goes on and on, the killers are still alive, they persist, they won’t stop talking. Just when you think they won’t mention their machete again, it’s back.

When the men return home from jail, it’s to a country in trauma. “The silence on the Rwandan hills is indescribable and cannot be compared with the usual mutism in the aftermath of war,” writes Hatzfeld. What Hatzfeld suggests is the possibility of an Africa in turmoil because of many of its people’s learned fatalism. Perhaps the most terrible line in Machete Season is spoken by Pio, who noted with astonishment the silence with which the Tutsis confronted their deaths, even as he came near to where they hid in the marsh, machete in hand. They did not fight back. They did not cry out. “They felt so abandoned they did not even open their mouths.”

Follow the Uranium – New York Times
July 17, 2005
By FRANK RICH

“I am saying that if anyone was involved in that type of activity which I referred to, they would not be working here.” – Ron Ziegler, press secretary to Richard Nixon, defending the presidential aide Dwight Chapin on Oct. 18, 1972. Chapin was convicted in April 1974 of perjury in connection with his relationship to the political saboteur Donald Segretti.

“Any individual who works here at the White House has the confidence of the president. They wouldn’t be working here at the White House if they didn’t have the president’s confidence.”
– Scott McClellan, press secretary to George W. Bush, defending Karl Rove on Tuesday.

WELL, of course, Karl Rove did it. He may not have violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, with its high threshold of criminality for outing a covert agent, but there’s no doubt he trashed Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame. We know this not only because of Matt Cooper’s e-mail, but also because of Mr. Rove’s own history. Trashing is in his nature, and bad things happen, usually through under-the-radar whispers, to decent people (and their wives) who get in his way. In the 2000 South Carolina primary, John McCain’s wife, Cindy, was rumored to be a drug addict (and Senator McCain was rumored to be mentally unstable). In the 1994 Texas governor’s race, Ann Richards found herself rumored to be a lesbian. The implication that Mr. Wilson was a John Kerry-ish girlie man beholden to his wife for his meal ticket is of a thematic piece with previous mud splattered on Rove political adversaries. The difference is that this time Mr. Rove got caught.

Even so, we shouldn’t get hung up on him – or on most of the other supposed leading figures in this scandal thus far. Not Matt Cooper or Judy Miller or the Wilsons or the bad guy everyone loves to hate, the former CNN star Robert Novak. This scandal is not about them in the end, any more than Watergate was about Dwight Chapin and Donald Segretti or Woodward and Bernstein. It is about the president of the United States. It is about a plot that was hatched at the top of the administration and in which everyone else, Mr. Rove included, are at most secondary players.

To see the main plot, you must sweep away the subplots, starting with the Cooper e-mail. It has been brandished as a smoking gun by Bush bashers and as exculpatory evidence by Bush backers (Mr. Rove, you see, was just trying to ensure that Time had its facts straight). But no one knows what this e-mail means unless it’s set against the avalanche of other evidence, most of it secret, including what Mr. Rove said in three appearances before the grand jury. Therein lies the rub, or at least whatever case might be made for perjury.

Another bogus subplot, long popular on the left, has it that Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, gave Mr. Novak a free pass out of ideological comradeship. But Mr. Fitzgerald, both young (44) and ambitious, has no record of Starr- or Ashcroft-style partisanship (his contempt for the press notwithstanding) or known proclivity for committing career suicide. What’s most likely is that Mr. Novak, more of a common coward than the prince of darkness he fashions himself to be, found a way to spill some beans and avoid Judy Miller’s fate. That the investigation has dragged on so long anyway is another indication of the expanded reach of the prosecutorial web.

Apparently this is finally beginning to dawn on Mr. Bush’s fiercest defenders and on Mr. Bush himself. Hence, last week’s erection of the stonewall manned by the almost poignantly clownish Mr. McClellan, who abruptly rendered inoperative his previous statements that any suspicions about Mr. Rove are “totally ridiculous.” The morning after Mr. McClellan went mano a mano with his tormentors in the White House press room – “We’ve secretly replaced the White House press corps with actual reporters,” observed Jon Stewart – the ardently pro-Bush New York Post ran only five paragraphs of a wire-service story on Page 12. That conspicuous burial of what was front-page news beyond Murdochland speaks loudly about the rising anxiety on the right. Since then, White House surrogates have been desperately babbling talking points attacking Joseph Wilson as a partisan and a liar.

These attacks, too, are red herrings. Let me reiterate: This case is not about Joseph Wilson. He is, in Alfred Hitchcock’s parlance, a MacGuffin, which, to quote the Oxford English Dictionary, is “a particular event, object, factor, etc., initially presented as being of great significance to the story, but often having little actual importance for the plot as it develops.” Mr. Wilson, his mission to Niger to check out Saddam’s supposed attempts to secure uranium that might be used in nuclear weapons and even his wife’s outing have as much to do with the real story here as Janet Leigh’s theft of office cash has to do with the mayhem that ensues at the Bates Motel in “Psycho.”

This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit – the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes – is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That’s why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair.

So put aside Mr. Wilson’s February 2002 trip to Africa. The plot that matters starts a month later, in March, and its omniscient author is Dick Cheney. It was Mr. Cheney (on CNN) who planted the idea that Saddam was “actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time.” The vice president went on to repeat this charge in May on “Meet the Press,” in three speeches in August and on “Meet the Press” yet again in September. Along the way the frightening word “uranium” was thrown into the mix.

By September the president was bandying about the u-word too at the United Nations and elsewhere, speaking of how Saddam needed only a softball-size helping of uranium to wreak Armageddon on America. But hardly had Mr. Bush done so than, offstage, out of view of us civilian spectators, the whole premise of this propaganda campaign was being challenged by forces with more official weight than Joseph Wilson. In October, the National Intelligence Estimate, distributed to Congress as it deliberated authorizing war, included the State Department’s caveat that “claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa,” made public in a British dossier, were “highly dubious.” A C.I.A. assessment, sent to the White House that month, determined that “the evidence is weak” and “the Africa story is overblown.”

AS if this weren’t enough, a State Department intelligence analyst questioned the legitimacy of some mysterious documents that had surfaced in Italy that fall and were supposed proof of the Iraq-Niger uranium transaction. In fact, they were blatant forgeries. When Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said as much publicly in the days just before “shock and awe,” his announcement made none of the three evening newscasts. The administration’s apocalyptic uranium rhetoric, sprinkled with mushroom clouds, had been hammered incessantly for more than five months by then – not merely in the State of the Union address – and could not be dislodged. As scenarios go, this one was about as subtle as “Independence Day” and just as unstoppable a crowd-pleaser.

Once we were locked into the war, and no W.M.D.’s could be found, the original plot line was dropped with an alacrity that recalled the “Never mind!” with which Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella used to end her misinformed Weekend Update commentaries on “Saturday Night Live.” The administration began its dog-ate-my-homework cover-up, asserting that the various warning signs about the uranium claims were lost “in the bowels” of the bureaucracy or that it was all the C.I.A.’s fault or that it didn’t matter anyway, because there were new, retroactive rationales to justify the war. But the administration knows how guilty it is. That’s why it has so quickly trashed any insider who contradicts its story line about how we got to Iraq, starting with the former Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill and the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke.

Next to White House courtiers of their rank, Mr. Wilson is at most a Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. The brief against the administration’s drumbeat for war would be just as damning if he’d never gone to Africa. But by overreacting in panic to his single Op-Ed piece of two years ago, the White House has opened a Pandora’s box it can’t slam shut. Seasoned audiences of presidential scandal know that there’s only one certainty ahead: the timing of a Karl Rove resignation. As always in this genre, the knight takes the fall at exactly that moment when it’s essential to protect the king.

Parlez vous Magma ?

STEVE LAKE warns: you’ve never heard anything like Magma!

CHRISTIAN Vander sits in the shadow of a room in a Kensington Hotel, an almost invisible black figure in the darkness of the chamber.
Black T-shirt: black jeans, black shoes, and black hair framing a dark complexioned face. You can’t tell where black ends or begins, he says. And besides, black is the colour of the state of the world right now
It’s now dusk on Sunday. The first time I saw Christian Vander was Wednesday last. lie was behind a drum-kit at the Marquee Club, flanked by the rest of his band.
But this wasn’t the routine Marquee bop. This was Magma, and I have never, NEVER seen anything like Magma,
Records in no way leave you prepared for the actual, live confrontation with this cataclysmic ensemble.
Try to visualise this: a dimly-lit stage, and dotted around it a number of grimfaced black-clad figures, one of them a beautiful girl, shrouded in a flowing cape. Another is a tall, slim bespectacled black man, who brings a serpentine contrabass clarinet slowly to his lips and begins to play.
A bald-headed bass guitarist, his instrument in ‘cello tuning, pumps out intimidatingly vicious fines. A bearded man, with exceptionally long hair, opens his mouth and begins to sing. So does the girl.
But if you were expecting rock and roll vocals, well, forget it, you came to the wrong place. This, this is opera, isn’t it?
The male singer is threshing and clawing at the air, a rich tenor flows easily from his mouth. Several octaves up the girl sings along with hum.
But the drummer, his countenance an extraordinary study of perpetually shifting leers and sneers, eyeballs turned upwards so all you can see are demented whites, suddenly charges into a furious march tempo, sticks blurring off the snare.
Jeezus, what is going on? ‘This is military madness, or a Covent Garden nightmare.
Alien syllables cut through the smokey air. Clientele looks puzzled. What language is chat? German? Some forgotten Slavonic tongue? Ah no, mes amis, this is Kobaian, and the reason you’ve never heard its like before is simple. Christian Vander made it up.
The music powers on. There’s much use made of repetition, and the strange words are chanted over and over with ever increasing intensity, until the group’s total emotional output becomes almost unbearable.
Vander whips at the cymbals with slashing savagery. Twin keyboards tear around the throbbing bass root-notes of Jannik Top.
Now the chanteurs are screaming. The clarinetist is screaming. Vander is screaming. God help us, the whole place seems to be screaming, a massive primaeval cry of anguish. Crash. Silence. Stunned applause.
“Mekanik Destructiw Kommandoh,” says the singer, Klaus Blasquiz. Still there is no trace of a smile.
Magma begin tri play again, like the stirring from slumber of some great beast. It’s as though they are trying to redefine heavy music.
I’ve never heard the horsemen of the Apocalypse, but I imagine that Vander’s drumming is a pretty fair approximation of other-wordly galloping hoofbeats. Sheer energy! What passion! Still the voices chant and shout.
“Hortz fur dehn stekehn west / Hortz zi wehr dunt da hertz…”
Jannik Top begins a bass solo, utilising every inch of the fretboard. Fingers flying everywhere, he steps to the mike, and proceeds to blow a whistle that’s wedged between his teeth. The shrill notes seem to slice through the brain.
Guitarist Claude Olmos, a tiny and emaciated figure, picks up the pulse and creates his own fantasy for a few moments before Vander solos.
Now, I hate rock drum solos, and I say that as a person who bas dabbled with the instrument a little, but Vander’s feature was honestly unbelievable.
It wasn’t just an exercise in speed, although he has that at his disposal too, but rather an object lesson in dynamics, rising from the verge of inaudibility to an earthquaking roar, and as the cacophony heightened, the drummer began to sing, his face continually contorting, head turned upwards to a suspended microphone as legs and arms flailed away.
The decibel level lowered a little, Christian executed one final flourish and quit the stage. End of set.
This time there’s no doubt about audience response. A mighty cheer rises, the crowd returning a little bit of the energy the band had expended.
To enthuse in superlatives is always dangerous, but occasionally a situation genuinely merits it. Magma at the Marquee was such a situation.

Four days after the gig, I still feel vaguely shell-shocked. I can’t quite rationalise away what I saw and heard.
Listening to Magma requires a lot of mental adjustment, a rethink about musical values, but it’s nonetheless a shattering experience.
And the group are so unlike anything else on this earth, that the thrill of discovery when you first see them is just unreal, like stumbling upon the Velvet Underground must have been for questing New Yorkers.
That’s how important Magna are. The New York Dolls and their ilk are great fun, absolutely, but Magma are important.

AND so to Sunday, and the Garden Court Hotel, where my interview created a closer relationship than the usual rock’n’roll tÍte-‡-tÍte.
Vander, you see, being French by upbringing, if not by ancestry, speaks very little English, and my French is just useless, sub – “O” – level school textbook stuff.
So, sitting between us, and acting as interpreter, is none other than Giorgio Gomelsky, daddy of British r and b, one-time manager of the Yardbirds and Julie Driscoll, and now father-figure to Magma.
Perhaps I should at this point explain, for those that don’t already know, that the lyrical matter of Magma’s material is a sci-fi trilogy that tells of mankind’s dealings with the planer Kobaia, a planet itself populated with renegade earthmen who became disenchanted with the dishonesty, uselessness, cruelty, vulgarity and lack of humility paramount on the mother planet, and who have developed their own language, society and technology in deep space.
However, if you think that is a sign to dismiss Magma as pretentious, half-baked, Hawkwind-type stoned drivel, then you’re making a very big mistake.
The whole allegory allows Vander to make some genuinely profound and spiritual statements, and the music is definitely not any cheapo-cheapo space rock.
Magma’s is music of the spheres, as succinctly understood as is that of Sun Ra, or Gyˆrgy Ligetti, or Gustav Holst, even, if you prefer a more accessible example.
Vander has devised his own category for the music, of which, incidentally, he is the prime composer. He calls it “Zeuhl Music” (“zeuhl” rhymes approximately with “earl”), and this Kobaian word is as much a comment on the intent of the music as it is the sound.
Zeuhl music is that which attains to higher ideals than the strictly material values of most pop or rock. Christian is fairly contemptuous of people who would deny the spiritual, or restrict their vision to earthly triviality.
“Most people now have too much self-esteem,” he says through Gomelsky, “believing that humans are the highest possible thing. It is very evident that you should have aims higher than you are; live to contribute something rather than just survive.
“Until you reach the highest state you can get to, you are always nothing compared to the universe.”
If that sounds fair enough, but you still feel overwhelmed at the prospect of listening to a verbal assault in a foreign tongue, then consider this.
The Continent has now, for the best part of 20 years, been dancing to English and American pop music of which the bulk of its populace understands nary a word.
Thus, for French fans, it was no big deal that Magma sang in another language.
And if you stop to think about it, maybe it isn’t such a big deal anyway. Christian says that Kobaian is a language to be felt rather than precisely understood, to be sung rather than spoken. But in case anyone is really perturbed, he’s working on a Kobaia-to-earth language dictionary.
The origin of the language makes an interesting little anecdote.
Prior to Magma, Christian was playing in a fairly sordid casino, laying down Coltrane-inspired jazz, but the audience was not aware, or did not want to be aware of what the group was doing. SoÖ
“I tried to explain to the audience that lots of musicians with really fabulous things to say practically committed suicide through their sadness at not being understood, like Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker.
” But they did not listen. And I am ashamed to say chat I came to hate them so much in that moment, that the words that came pouring out of me were so strong that it was better that they could not understand them.
“It was better that they were not in French. In that moment I wished them all dead, and that is unusual, because I have a great respect for life – rightly or wrongly.” .
John Coltrane was the great spiritual love of Vander’s life because he was playing for his time, rather than makimg any pretentious claims to be making “music for the future.” Any music that purports to be avant-garde, says Vander, is out of touch with reality.
Magma’s intention is not to play for any elite, but rather to educate the mass audience to the appropriate level, or rather as Christian puts it, to simply make the audience more aware.
Vander is passionately convinced of the importance of Magma.
“Before Magma, Coltrane was more important than anyone to me. Now I love Magma most, and Coltrane just immediately after.
“I will explain why. When you put all your emotions and all your feelings into something, it’s logical that you’re going to love that thing more than any other.
“Previously Coltrane was always closest to my heart, but it wasn’t my heart, in fact, it was Coltrane’s. But playing his music helped me to find my own.”
By the time you read this, Magma will be winging their way back to their Paris residence. But fear not, they’ll be back.
The third album from the group, “Mekanik Destructiw Kommandoh,” the first to be released in Britain, will be available on A & M in January. And live performances here will recommence in February, when the band will be supported by Nico, an ardent fan of Magma.
Nico, says Gomelsky, plays zeuhl music, too. I wouldn’t doubt that for a moment.
So, that’s one tour you miss out on at your peril. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

Steve Lake
Melody Maker – December 15, 1973