Maxime Denuc, “Club Imperiale” (light-years, 2026)
The pipe organ has undergone quite a renaissance in recent years, as the instrument’s uniquely sonorous, room-filling sound understandably holds a lot of allure for many contemporary drone artists. However, French composer Maxime Denuc is something of an intriguing outlier in that regard. On this, his first release for Caterina Barbieri’s light-years imprint, Denuc wields a “hand-built Max/MSP sequencer” to precisely control the instrument via MIDI and unleash “dense clouds of impossible-to-play notes that ricochet backwards and forwards through history.” Notably, that last bit is a reference to Denuc’s ambitious efforts to imagine “a point of creative symbiosis between the Catholic church and the ecstatic dancefloors of the early ’90s.” While blurring baroque music and progressive trance into a single unified vision is an admittedly cool trick, doing it in an entirely beatless way undeniably limits the idea’s potential a bit. Consequently, some of the strongest pieces on Club Imperial tend to be the less conceptually radical ones that nod to the more ambient/kosmische side of krautrock visionaries like Popol Vuh.
The opening “Hallucinogen” makes for quite a killer statement of intent, as Denuc kicks off the album with a rapid and flutelike arpeggio Ouroboros that gradually expands with celestial chords and deep bass notes to impressively delirious effect. While it is undeniably a clear album highlight, it is also one of the most perfect iterations of a template that recurs throughout the album, so the other highlights tend to be the pieces that either depart from that formula or add some kind of inspired twist to it. In “Atlantis,” for example, Denuc slows his lush and anthemic trance-inspired magic into a bleary ambient piece that slowly snowballs in intensity until it lands somewhere between an organ mass and the infinitely looping bliss of a great Celer piece. Elsewhere, “La Paloma” is the album’s finest variation on its rich central theme, as Denuc revisits the rapidly fluttering arpeggios of “Hallucinogen” with a bit more instability and the mid-song surprise of a vibrantly shimmering and smeary new layer.
For me, however, the album’s strongest piece is the more baroque-indebted “Plaster Figures,” which feels like a lovesick organist duelling it out with Popol Vuh’s iconic Aguirre soundtrack. However, I am also quite fond of the rippling soft-focus beauty of “Sueños” and the lush, achingly beautiful bliss-out “Club Imperiale.” In fact, my only real caveat with Club Imperiale is that it seems to have the same vamp-like limitations that I would expect from a synth album: a cool motif is introduced, it experiences some compelling small-scale transformations, and then it fades away. Then again, maybe that facet is entirely by design and Denuc is exclusively chasing the feeling of an especially rapturous progressive house breakdown.
If so, that would be thematically appropriate, as I imagine hearing the perfect heavenly chords hit just as the sun rises over Ibiza (or wherever) would feel like a legitimately ecstatic/religious experience (certainly more so than anything that I personally experienced growing up Catholic—sorry, God!). In short, Club Imperiale is the sound of Maxime Denuc valiantly and single-mindedly straining heavenward, but it is also a minor masterpiece of craftsmanship, as he manipulates his simple array of moving parts and patterns with the mastery of a world-class DJ and does so on an incredibly complex instrument.
Similarly, Denuc also took great care to reproduce his performance as faithfully as possible with his microphone placements and multi-dimensional sound designed to capture the cathedral’s natural acoustics and the “natural delays and breathy emotional traces” that “seem to dissolve the very fabric of time.” While I still believe that the pulsing and churning drones of Nachthorn’s “Düsseldorf” arguably remain Denuc’s personal zenith, that is only because that piece is quite a daunting bar to clear. Club Imperiale is truly a unique and boldly inventive labor of love and I could easily imagine several of these pieces being an absolutely mind-blowing experience in their more immersive native habitat (a cathedral with a pipe organ).
Listen here.
