No, he wasn't, but he might have been a better writer of classical pop music - which isn't the same thing at all. Or, to put it another way, Les Noches has a musical and timbral concept so strong that it's big enough for more than one piece, and will still work when watered down with repetition and flavored up with colorful orchestration.
And a big similarity in emotional effect to modal-period Coltrane, which is where I think Vander got much of his inspiration - and then, like Orff, changed the result into something quite different.
But as for Glass and Riley, I'm not sure they had gotten out of the NYC lofts at that point - early classical Minimalism was mostly an American movement, and its impact was only felt slowly in Europe. MDK came out in 1973, and while Eno and Bowie had heard Glass and Reich, I'm not sure they were known on the Continent at all; Louis Andriessen, often considered the pre-eminent European Minimalist, was just getting his Orkest de Volharding group started at the time. So James Brown and Electric Miles might be more likely influences for Magma.
Bookmarks