Ulan Bator, a French ensemble led by guitarist Amaury Cambuzat, specialized in a progressive-rock of quirky and austere compositions. Ulan Bator (Les Disques Du Soleil, 1994) inaugurated their all-instrumental project. Haupstadt is a blend of Afro-pop, buzzing drones and crunchy guitar riffs. Cerf-volant pairs minimalist repetition with strident flute improvisation. that ends in a volcanic eruption. On the other hand, Cheetah Carnage is a slab of roaring industrial-metal. The final surreal touch is the android march of Radio Disco, like a military tank limping in the battlefield at the end of the battle.

The band came into its own with the all-instrumental mini-album 2 Degrees (Les Disques Du Soleil, 1996) that defined their style as a synthesis of post-rock (loud echoes of Slint in the dejected and incoherent doodling of Polaire), new wave (intimations of Chrome in the bacchanal of D-Press TV), and German rock of the 1970s (shades of Can in the brainy and jazzy Silence). The two recordings will be later summarized on Polaire (CPI, 1998).

Vegetale (jul 1997 - oct 1997) is a much better amalgam of their influences. The eight-minute Lumiere Blanche makes the mistake of incorporating vocals: they are weak and distract from the instrumental counterpoint. An even bigger mistake is the spoken-word section in the middle of Pekisch Organ that weakens the already weak momentum of the piece. Cephalopode focuses on the interplay and post-rock and fares better before the clownish coda. Fievre Hectique falls flat for the same reason, despite a hallucinated coda. Embarquement is first a soaring post-psychedelic bolero and then a post-jazz fanfare, and would be a brilliant idea without the recitation. Finally, Hart sticks to what they do better, and the result is chamber rock music of high quality.

The production of Mike Gira turns Ulan Bator's album Ego Echo (Young God, 2000) into an organic flow of ambient drones and psychedelic noise. The compositions are now lengthy, slow and majestic. The orchestration is thick and sometimes thundering (harmonium, electric piano, Hammond organ, mellotron, trumpet, French horn). The 16-minute tour de force of Let Go Ego opens with psychedelic dub overtones escalating into distorted hard-rock and then a chanting nightmare. Not quite Amon Duul II or Popol Vuh, but the closest they have been to matching the creativity of German rock of the 1970s. The nine-minute Hemisphere sets in motion piano patterns that rise like a mirage from a soundscape of harsh repetitive jamming. Again, Amaury Cambuzat cannot resist ruining the atmosphere with some recitation. The ten-minute Echo opens with didjeridoo-like vibrations that are soon overcome by harsh distorted drones (like a sped-up version of LaMonte Young), but, again, a recitation over sparse piano notes destroys the momentum. The atmosphere of the album is not properly gothic but occasionally gloomy, as the trio runs the gamut from psychedelic-rock (the song Santa Lucia) to folk elegy (Hiver) and pop melodrama (Soeur Violence).

OK KO (Ursula Minor, 2002) offers eight "alternative" versions of those tracks.

Nouvel Air (Disques du Soleil, 2003), the first album without founding member Olivier Manchion, marked a retreat towards the song format. This album is far less about the band's music and Amaury Cambuzat's poetics than about production technique.

Ulan Bator still released: Rodeo Massacre (2005), Tohu-Bohu (2010), En France/ En transe (2013), Abracadabra (2016), and Stereolith (2017).

Amaury Cambuzat, also a Faust guitarist, released Rec.Requiem (which collects four pieces recorded in january 2019), AmOrtH (2019), that mainly contains the 40-minute title-track, Inside The Cathedral Sessions (improvisations for guitar and effects as broadcasted weekly on YouTube) and I Feel Like A Bombed Cathedral (2019).