When two paths to ecstasy unexpectedly converged in the middle of the Mediterranean, Maxime Denuc’s Club Imperiale was born. Two years ago, the French composer was sent video footage of a bride and groom walking the aisle on the small Spanish island of Menorca, but it was the soundtrack, rather than the scenery, that made an impression: Instead of the standard nuptial accompaniment—Vivaldi, Bach, Celine Dion—the organist performed Denuc’s own “Infinite End,” a minimalist epic from his 2022 album Nachthorn.
Encountering his own music reverberating through the church’s majestic limestone arches, Denuc experienced a vision of gleaming whitewashed chapels perched above azure seas. But the Balearic connection also brought to mind more profane associations: namely, the Mediterranean discotheques of yore, many of them now falling to pieces, and the pulse-raising trance and techno that once flourished in them.
No score yet, be the first to add.
The dancefloor-as-church metaphor is not a particularly novel conceit. But, as a specialist in MIDI-controlled pipe organs, Denuc had an ace up the sleeve of his frock: He would run the key tropes of classic trance music—tumbling arpeggios, soaring counterpoints, earthshaking bass—through the grandest instrument he could get his hands on. He spent the next year at work in Düsseldorf’s St. Antonius Church, controlling the organ with a custom-designed Max/MSP sequencer, and availing himself of the building’s natural reverb to stretch his tones into a heavenly blur.
Much like dead malls in America, Europe’s crumbling nightclubs have inspired their own genre of ruin porn, of which Club Imperiale might be viewed as a particularly rose-tinted example. The album is named after a legendary club on the Tuscan coast, and many of its elements, if performed on an instrument like the Roland JP-8000, would be indistinguishable from the most ecstatic rave anthems of the early 1990s. In Denuc’s hands, though, they’ve been pulverized and smeared into a hazy state of ecstatic longing.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
