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Magas
brain
The Chicago electronic rocker unleashes
By Jimmy Draper
Friends
Forever.
'WHEN I GET
onstage, the music kinda takes over and I lose my rational
thought," James Marlon Magas says with a laugh. Talking on
the phone from Weekend Records and Soap, the music-homemade soap
shop he runs with his wife in Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood,
the electronic rocker known simply as Magas is discussing
his notoriously energetic stage shows. "Something happens where
I can't really help not to freak out. It's just something that comes
natural, so why fight it? Sometimes I have to fight it a little
bit, though, so I don't fall off the stage or knock over everybody's
gear."
The last time
I saw Magas perform, the shirtless, hairy-chested man commanding
the stage at Detroit's St. Andrew's Hall was fighting more
than just his own impulses – he was taking on a crossed-arm
crowd impatiently waiting for headliner Trans Am. Not an easy task,
considering that his refreshingly unself-conscious and engaging
stage presence – less garishly caricatured than schlock-shocker
Gonzales's and more sinister and sexy than Har Mar Superstar's strut-and-strip
shtick – certainly isn't likely to impress many of the self-important
bores in the post-rock demographic.
Their loss.
A whirlwind of flailed limbs, barked vocals, and relentlessly
repetitive, apocalyptic beats, Magas's performance that night more
than lived up to his rep as a one-man party band. Playing the largely
apathetic, 1,000-plus crowd like a pro, he bounded across the stage,
head-banging, jumping, shouting, pointing fingers, and giving props
to the few dancers up front as he raced through booty baiters like
"Toys" and "Lovecompressor." He wasn't so unhinged
that he left broken gear in his wake, but his unbridled enthusiasm
made it obvious why he's become known in certain circles as one
of electronic music's best entertainers. It's not for nothing, after
all, that he's been invited to share the stage with everyone from
Sonic Youth and Peaches to Andrew W.K. and the Sea and Cake.
Not, as the
Trans Am show proved, that everyone is enamored of his in-your-face
performance style. "What I'm doing is still a little unusual,"
Magas continues, claiming that uptight electronic purists and technophobic
rockers have been quick to dismiss him. "I'm singing and jumping
around, although it's starting to become a little more acceptable
now. When I first started doing this, my punk roots were almost
a liability, whereas now they tend to be a little bit of an asset.
People are starting to become more used to seeing people sing and
freak out and jump around while playing electronic music, as opposed
to sitting down behind a table and playing gear."
Move to minimalism
A veteran of
Michigan's Bulb Records rock underground – which includes
the likes of early Andrew W.K., Duotron, and 25 Suaves, among
others – Magas fled Ann Arbor for Chicago in 1995 after Couch,
his duo with Bulb owner Pete Larson, broke up. Inspired by the Windy
City's burgeoning no wave enclave at the time, he planned to form
a new band alongside acts such as Math, the Scissor Girls, Zeek
Sheck, and the Flying Luttenbachers. By the time he arrived and
started Lake of Dracula with the Luttenbachers' Weasel Walter
and Scissor Girl Heather M., however, the scene that prompted his
move was dissolving.
"Pretty
much when I got here, everybody moved away and all those bands broke
up," he says, chuckling. Lake of Dracula followed suit, disbanding
in '97 after releasing an album and a handful of 7-inches on labels
including Kill Rock Stars, Carcrash, and Skin Graft.
Without a band
and bored with rock, he began exploring electronic music. It wasn't
until he saw up-and-comers Wolf Eyes and Quintron – acts making
rock with drum machines and other electronic equipment – however,
that Magas was inspired to create music again. He bought a Roland
MC-505 "because it seemed like something weird and that you
could [use to] have a one-man band," taught himself to program
it, and began performing and recording in 1999.
"I pretty
much wanted to make hard-rocking records but do it electronically
and not cop out and resort to a distorted guitar," he says
of the minimalist, rock-influenced electronic music that resulted.
His first EP, 2000's self-released Double-Sided Magas, didn't
exactly fly off the shelves, but it caught the attention of Detroit's
Ersatz Audio, the label run by Adult.'s Adam Lee Miller and
Nicola Kuperus. Miller decided to coproduce and put out Magas's
next release, last spring's Bad Blood EP, and offered him
a crash course in the world of analog recording.
"You hear
a real 808 and you go, 'Ah! This is what it's supposed to sound
like! That's the sound I was trying to get for so long but just
couldn't do it with the 505!' " Magas says. "[After recording
Bad Blood] I eventually started increasing my sound palette,
little by little, basically limited by the amount of money that
I had. I'd pick up one piece here and covet it. Then I'd get a little
more money and another piece. It becomes almost like an obsession,
gaining access to certain sounds."
In his head
Whereas Double-Sided
Magas and Bad Blood sound small and thin at times, Friends
Forever, his recent full-length debut, comes off like it's
the first time that Magas has truly reproduced the sounds he's
always heard in his head. Racing and pulsing with stiff, party-starting
precision, the album's 11 tracks range from Adult.-like electro-paranoia
to PiL-poppin', punk-inflected instrumentals that belong in rock
clubs as much as they do on dance floors. Songs such as "Toys
(Redux)," remixed by Miller on the vinyl version, "Klub
99," and the rerecorded "Lovecompressor (Edit)" throb
with an abandon previously not found on Magas's releases. It is,
not insignificantly, also the first time he's managed to capture
his manic live energy.
"He's just
as amazing in the studio as he is onstage," says Miller, who
coproduced the album with Magas, of the weeklong recording session
at Ersatz Audio. "We often had to rerecord vocal takes, not
because they were off or anything, but because he would fall down
and lose the microphone. Once he almost fell down the stairs that
are in the corner of the attic studio, because he was so into the
music that he had no perception of his surroundings."
"It was
really a sorta intense, driving [recording] experience," Magas
says. "It wasn't especially relaxed in a good way."
Which makes
sense considering that, like his label mates Adult., Tamion 12 Inch,
and Goudron, Magas thrives on tension. An almost claustrophobic
discomfort permeates Friends Forever as he spits out eerily
surrealist, stream-of-consciousness lyrics about, well, nocturnal
toys, paralyzing fear, and deathly nightclub experiences, over menacing,
metal-tinged beats and synth-punk squalls. While lines like "Intervening
from another world / You come searching for the perfect girl,"
from "Dead Quasars," are potentially hokey rhymes ripe
for corny, Earth Girls Are Easy-style ridicule, Magas's gravelly
growl and earnestness keep the mood grave.
"There
certainly is an element of humor to the songs, but they're not meant
to be jokes," he says. "The songs are deadly serious at
the same time."
Such tension
carries over to his performances, during which his electro-nihilist
antics have been known to nearly immediately polarize audiences
into Magas lovers or loathers. He wouldn't have it any other way,
either.
"Most people
usually get scared, and they don't wanna talk after the gig,"
he says proudly, then laughs. "But I've had headbangers with
long hair come up afterwards and say, 'Dude, I mostly listen to
metal, but your music really does it for me.' I love hearing that!
If a heavy metal guy likes it, then I must be doing something right!"
Magas
performs May 7, 9 p.m., Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., S.F.
$10. (415) 626-4455.
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