Univers Zero

Their mission was inaugurated with Univers Zero (Atem, 1977 - (Cryonic, 1984 - Cuneiform, 2008), recorded in august 1977 and reissued as 1313 which was the original catalog number. when they were a septet and their sound was still inspired by contemporary rock acts. The 15-minute Ronde revealed Daniel Denis as an eccentric, exuberant and erudite composer in the vein of Frank Zappa's Uncle Meat. The fantasia begins with a hybrid of neoclassical scherzo and minimalist repetition that soon turns into a Frank Zappa-esque fanfare. That begins a tortured, syncopated journey that alternates Berlioz-like pizzicato string passages and magniloquent horn and organ crescendoes, Ravel-like steps and folk dances, gypsy violin melodies and cabaret-like rhythms, ending in an expressionist nightmare of sustained tones. Michel Berckmans's bassoon, Marcel Dufrane's violin, Patrick Hanappier's viola and Emmanuel Nicaise's harmonium ran the gamut from clownish to high-brow, while Denis' conduction left little to chance.
Trigaux's Docteur Petiot is a more clownish piece with emphasis on trivial melodies and rhythms bordering on military marches and the music-hall. Strings and harpsichord dominate the middle-eastern saraband Malasie, also composed by Trigaux and also leaning towards the jovial end of the spectrum.
The CD reissue includes Denis' 28-minute La Faulx (april 1979), a jam that builds up slowly from some avant-noise improvisation to structured melodic and rhythmic patterns.

Heresie (Cryonic, 1979) refined the mechanism. Using a Gothic subject as a pretext, La Faulx spent twenty-three minutes experimenting with every type of score. The piece opens with a confused murmur of the orchestra’s instruments; then the singer recites an exorcism over the piano’s funereal notes, leading into a crescendoing witches’ dance cadence. A lighthearted bassoon theme leads into an uneven march, halfway between a Stravinsky ballet and a Ravel suite. But the counterpoints grow increasingly discordant, bringing the music back into the infernal circles from which it began. Jack The Ripper, by contrast, is a more oppressive than horrific piece, caught between jazz-rock motifs and heavy-industrial cadences and fractures. In addition to Denis’s percussion and Berckmans’s bassoon, Roger Trigaux’s keyboards and Patrick Hanappier’s violin are foregrounded. This was Trigaux’s last album with Univers Zero.

The style brushes against sensationalism on Ceux Du Dehors (Recommended, 1982), with the driving jazz-rock progressions of Dense, the apocalyptic funeral chorus of La Corne Du Bois Des Pendu, and the nervous expressionist piece Combat.

Two years later, production was further refined on Uzed (Recommended, 1984), and the group reached the mannerism of Heatwave (Recommended, 1986), an orchestrated album for a more modern ensemble (two electronic keyboards, strings, winds, guitar, bass, drums) and rich in spectacular electronic tour de forces such as Chinavox. The titanic and tumultuous Funeral Plain summarizes and expands eight years of experiments: atonal chamber music, jazz-rock, minimalism, industrial music, classical rondos, orientalism, and so on.

The group disbanded the following year.

Less austere than Art Zoyd, Univers Zero were reminiscent of English progressive rock and art-rock, but no less daring in attempting to fuse classical avant-garde with rock. If Art Zoyd were the Satie of rock, Univers Zero were its Poulenc.

Meanwhile, Trigaux formed Present with pianist Alain Rochette.

On his own, Denis composed Sirius And The Ghosts (Cuneiform, 1991), an album that does not stray far from the latest Univers Zero works but exploits minimalist techniques more consciously and emphasizes percussion propulsion; and, two years later, Les Eaux Troubles, an album that decisively opens new horizons, both through the incursions of Les Portes and Second Presage into aggressive jazz-rock, through the variations on folk themes in Bulgarian Flying Spirit Dances, and (above all) through the cubist ballets of Strategeme and Electronica Mambo-Musette, conducted at broken rhythms as if sampled at discrete intervals. Denis thus continues the program of transferring avant-garde techniques and motifs into the corpus of rock music.

This album was followed by Les Eaux Troubles (Cuneiform, 1993).

Denis reunited his Univers Zero for The Hard Quest (April 1999 - Cuneiform, 1999), an album that holds its own alongside the group’s classic works. Denis remains the sardonic and uncontainable composer he has always been, capable of ranging from medieval ceremonial music (Vieux-Manants) to Frank Zappa-style fanfares (Civic Circus, Rebus), from jazz-rock (Affinité) to avant-garde music (Kermesse Atomique). The long Xenantaya is above all a tribute to Denis’s career, his exquisite taste in arrangement, his masterful skills as an ensemble conductor, and his countless sources of inspiration.

(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)

Crawling Wind (Cuneiform, 2000) collects a live performance and rare 1983 recordings.

Rhythmix (october 2001 - Cuneiform, 2002), the second album of new material since the 1999 reunion, displays Daniel Denis' further explorations into classical music. Ten musicians contribute to the album, and that accounts for the increasingly "orchestral" sound. Terres Noires employs a plethora of quotations from 20th century music and ends in the grotesque fashion of Frank Zappa's Orchestral Favourites. Shangai's Digital Talks, perhaps the most inventive piece here, is a sinister sketch, heavy on the keyboards' staccatos. The slow, repetitive Reve Cyclique smells of fauve ballets of a century before, updated to Sixties' minimalism and exotic jazz of the Fifties. The suave bassoon melody of The Invisible Light could be taken from a Cajkovsky ballet.
The album also features some of Denis' boldest experiments, like the percussive nightmare of Rouages, that weds Edgar Varese, Crash Worship and Mike Oldfield, or the orgiastic Emotions Galactiques, that mixes a frantic horns fanfare (sounding like a beehive), confused piano hammering and Steve Reich-ian wooden percussions.
The Fly-Toxmen's Land is the only track that clearly belongs to prog-rock (i.e., to rock music): emphatic, loud and exilarating.
Occasionally revolutionary, at times ahead of its time, always intriguing, rarely redundant, Denis' music continues to surprise and to entertain.

Implosion (Cuneiform, 2004) features Denis (drums, percussion, keyboard, samplers, accordion, guitar), Michel Berckmans (oboe, English horn, bassoon), Serge Bertocchi (saxes & tubax), Aurelia Boven (cello), Ariane De Bievre (flute, piccolo), Dirk Descheemaeker (bass clarinet, clarinet), Bart Maris (trumpet, flugelhorn), Eric Plantain (electric bass), Christophe Pons (acoustic guitar), Bart Quartier (marimba, glockenspiel), and Igor Semenoff (violin).

The fourth album since the reunion, Implosion (november 2003 - Cuneiform, 2004), released on the 30th anniversary of the band's birth, is not up to their standards. A few of the motifs are brilliant (Falling Rain Dance, Mellotronic), but most of the (short) pieces and even the nine-minute suite Meandres are mere reiterations of prog-rock cliches and, in any event, too fragmented to stand up as a whole. Partch's X-Ray is the notable exception: an avantgarde piece overflowing with intriguing solutions.

Live (june 2005)

Relaps (2008) collects previously unreleased live recordings from march 1984 to february 1986.

Clivages (may 2009 - Cuneiform, 2010) was a new studio album (Daniel Denis on drums, Michel Berckmans on bassoon, oboe and English horn, Kurt Budé on clarinet and alto sax, Pierre Chevalier on keyboards, Dimitri Evers on bass, Andy Kirk on guitar and Martin Lauwers on violin). The joyful orchestral fanfare that opens the work, Les Kobolds , contrasts starkly with the tragic tone of the suite that follows, the twelve-minute Warrior, that could be the expressionistic soundtrack to a horror movie, replete with hard-rock guitar, industrial rhythm and free-jazz horns. By the same token, the jazz and exotic overtones of the impressionistic carousel Soubresauts contrast starkly with the noir languor of the eight-minute bluesy lento Retour De Foire. In other words, this is an album of polar opposites, the neoclassical intermezzo Vacillements balancing the abstract electroacoustic intermezzo Earth Scream. The 14-minute Straight Edge embodies that split personality, alternating between dreamy brooding quiescence and thundering frenzied neurosis.

Univers Zero's 13th album Phosphorescent Dreams (2014) was performed by a new lineup, consisting of Antoine Guenet (keyboards), Nicolas Dechene (guitars), Dimitry Evers (bass), Kurt Bude (clarinets, alto and tenor saxes) Daniel Denis (drums).

Univers Zero returned with Lueur (Sub Rosa, 2023), performed by Daniel Denis (keyboards, drums, percussion), Nicolas Dechene (guitars), Kurt Bude (clarinets) and Nicolas Denis (bass, percussion, vocals).

Univers Zero's Guy Segers formed Eclectic Maybe Band that released Bars Without Measures (Discus, 2023), featuring Julie Tippetts, Dani Klein, Sibel Dincer and Daniel Vincke-Saz (vocals), Pierre Bernard (flute), Piet Van Bockstal (oboe), Stephan Kohr (bassoon), Martin Archer (saxello), Dirk Descheemaeker (clarinets), Joe Higham (clarinet and soprano sax), Mark Bogaerts (alto and baritone saxes), Dave Newhouse (baritone sax), Jean Pierre Soarez (trumpet), Franck Cottret (trombone), Marianne Denoia, Cecile Broche, Ariane Plumerel and Forrest Fang (violins), Thierry Zaboitzeff (cello), Michel Delory, Pierre Vervloesem, Michel Delville, Angel Ontalva and Matvi Bilis (guitars), Andy Kirk and Catherine Smet (keyboards), Sean Rickman, Fabrice Owerzarzak and Dirk Wachtelaer (drums).