Neptunian Maximalism – Cosmic Rituals for a New Era

Neptunian Maximalism, often abbreviated NNMM, are a Belgian band formed in 2018 by Guillaume Cazalet and saxophonist Jean-Jacques Duerinckx. Their distinguishing trait is a knack for fusing the cosmic and the psychedelic, the horrific and the science-fictional. They are, in effect, a sprawling drone orchestra with a variable line-up.
The band inhabits a stylistic tetragon whose four corners are avant-jazz, psychedelia, drone-metal and zeuhl. Sun Ra and John Zorn, Sunn O))) and Magma, Tangerine Dream and Jon Hassell, Faust and Grateful Dead, alongside the towering avant-metal of Schammasch's "Triangle", are among the names their music conjures up. In their most hallucinated moments they're worthy heirs to Acid Mothers Temple; in their darker, more esoteric passages they recall the most evocative Swans.
Standing at the absolute opposite pole from any commercial format, they've developed their music through two formats: live recordings of more or less structured cosmic rituals, and a studio album of colossal proportions, Éons. With their cosmic jazz-rock-metal ultra-psychedelia, they depict the end of the Anthropocene and the dawn of a new era.

The First Live Documents: the Two "Voodoo Heavy Tribal Experience" Releases and the First Dedication to the Sun

The band's first performance dates back to 25 March 2018 and is documented on HS63: A Voodoo Heavy Tribal Experience. This towering jam, "Oi Sonouf Vaoresaji!", is the result of an artist residency held the previous day and marks the official birth of the project. It's music entirely improvised by four musicians who had never played together before: Sebastien Schmit (drums and percussion), Pierre Arese (drums and percussion), Jean Jacques Duerinckx (amplified baritone saxophone) and Guillaume Cazalet, aka CZLT (amplified bass and guitar, vocals).
The sonic exploration, almost 40 minutes in total, is an abstract ritual. In the first few minutes the tolling of percussion dominates, then the baritone sax and a voice using Mongolian "throat singing" join the mix. A climax gives way to an obsessive, esoteric and mysterious voodoo ritual that at times turns into free jazz. The darkest dimension emerges after the fifteen-minute mark, with sinister sounds and rock-tinged reinforcements. The baritone sax is left alone, amid alien miasmas. The calm is only temporary: the percussion starts to swirl and menacing drones animate the piece up to a second moment of tension. What follows is a lopsided, pachydermic funk-jazz, decidedly heavy. The final seven minutes are dominated by drones, in a language close to Sunn O))), and represent the most pedestrian section of this jam — until a jazz-metal whirlwind emerges and leads into the grand finale, a thunderous explosion.

This first live document pairs with M4: A Voodoo Heavy Tribal Experience (2018, though released in 2020), performed by the same line-up. This time there are two compositions. "Dan Ayido Hwedo / Ngowekara", almost thirty minutes long, is an invocation opened by mysterious tolling and a piercing sax melody, slowly transformed into a smoky free jazz. Around the seventh minute it turns monstrous, with a noisy assault. More tribal and chaotic, the invocation continues, propelled by electric bass thrusts, taking on a heavily hallucinated funk-metal and tribal groove, thinning out only at the fifteen-minute mark. Frantic percussion fades into mournful drones, scratched by the saxophone and then brought back to a hypnotic groove. A suffocating drone thickens like a deathly fog, while the percussion carries the invocation forward. A relentless distorted bass riff is the only fixed point in the finale, around which a free-jazz cloud explodes for the close: two minutes of tribal drone-metal, a voodoo rite blending ethnomusicology and psychedelia.
The shorter "Daiitoku-Myōō no ŌDAIKO 大威徳明王 鼓童: L'Impact De Théia durant l'Éon Hadéen" uses its nine minutes to deliver a far more direct assault, a funk-metal with jazz inserts, psychedelic fumes and sepulchral rumbles. From the sixth minute on it becomes alien ambient. The track refers to Theia (often also spelled Teia), a hypothetical ancient planet roughly the size of Mars, which existed during the very earliest phases of the solar system's history, in the Hadean Eon, about four and a half billion years ago. According to the giant-impact hypothesis, widely accepted in planetary science, Theia catastrophically collided with the primordial Earth: the impact destroyed the planet and hurled an immense quantity of debris into space, from whose aggregation our Moon was formed. The name comes from the Titaness of Greek mythology, mother of Selene, the goddess of the Moon.

A third live release, HS63: A Solar Drone Opera NNMM Arkestra (2019, though released in 2020), features an expanded line-up. Reshma Goolamy (bass), Romain Martini (guitar), Didié Nietzche (digital soundscape), Joaquin Bermudez (amplified saz and setar) and Alice Thiel (guitar and synth) join the project, which here takes the shape of a drone opera. This time there are three tracks: two enormous ones bookending a short one.
"EÔS: Avènement de l'Éon Evaísthitozoïque Probocène Flamboyant" takes up the first 32 minutes and is actually rather disappointing. It's compelling in its early stages, as the piece thickens like a cloud, organically building toward a structure. Around the ten-minute mark, though, everything settles into a funereal pace that then carries on for over 20 minutes, with the variations in arrangement doing little to lift the numbing monotony of the whole.
With ears still reeling from the first piece, "Iadanamada!: Homo-sensibilis se Prosternant sous la Lumière Cryptique de Proboscidea-sapiens" sounds like a balm: three minimal minutes, guided by a simple bass melody. It's followed by the far more substantial "The Conference Of The Stars", over 22 minutes long. Opened by a menacing tribal explosion, with a psychedelic drone acting as its skeleton, the conference turns into a languid march recalling Pink Floyd's "A Saucerful Of Secrets" until a drone-metal surge sinks its teeth into the track. The march resumes, now with a chanting voice added, and an acceleration leads to a first climax. An obsessive drumbeat opens the second part, more frantic and percussion-dominated, with occasional psychedelic baths and ever-present drones. The coda is a cosmic nightmare, caught between galactic tolling and monstrous voices.
Despite the inherent limits of live recordings and often-improvised compositions, these live documents effectively sketch out the band's aesthetic. Now the time is ripe to bring these cosmic invocations into the studio.

Cosmic Rituals for Elephants: "The Conference Of Stars" and, above all, "Éons"

The Conference Of Stars (2018), an Ep, presents the title track flanked by three shorter compositions, some of them decidedly abstract. The new version of the conference is much shorter and more clearly defined in its stages. In its current 16 minutes, the opening is dominated by bass and sax, with tellurian drones in support. What follows is a spoken-word passage, not especially compelling, set within a smoky, mysterious free-jazz-metal.

The long wait for a more substantial studio album ends in 2020. Éons is split into no fewer than three parts: first the section "To The Earth", then "To The Moon" and finally "To The Sun". The 16 compositions run past the 2-hour mark in total. Taken together, they recount the Earth's evolution, the end of the Anthropocene and the rise of a new era dominated by elephants, the "Proboscene".
The opening "Daiitoku-Myōō No Ōdaiko" is a dissonant jazz magma driven by fat brass set against reverbed sax, a limping, illogical dance teetering on the edge of chaos. It's an originary universe, which mutates into the menacing tribalism of "Nganga", a warlike, spiritual ritual that shatters into the suffocated drones of "Lamasthu", before the psych-rock of "Ptah Sokar Osiris" clatters in, somewhere between Grateful Dead and kraut-rock, yet pervaded by a sumptuous maximalism.
Settled into the liquid, cosmic dark-jazz of "Enuma Elis", the first third of the work comes to a close: we've only just reached the Proterozoic Eon, which ended over 500 million years ago. What follows is first a mournful dance ("Zar") and then a triptych dedicated to "Vajrabhairava", a metaphysical entity dear to Buddhism, invoked with apocalyptic, shamanic intensity in a harrowing trance.
"Oi Sonuf Vaoresaji!", dedicated to the sixth, future mass extinction, reduces everything to post-apocalyptic miasmas, and introduces the third and final part. This is an abstract, unfathomable quartet of science-fiction visions, described by Cazalet as a "solar drone opera", opening with "Eòs" (18 minutes), a cathedral of drones that turns into an acid prayer. "Heliozoapolis" (15 minutes) is the disorienting counterpart to the more dreamlike Stephan Micus of "Implosions". Such an adventurous journey closes fittingly with the reflective "Khonsou Sokaris", an ambient-jazz-drone piece steeped in feedback.
It's a disorienting journey, made up of extended instrumental passages alternating with brief vocal interventions in liturgical, esoteric tones. The lyrics are provided by Pierre Lanchantin, a scholar of proto-languages at the University of Cambridge. The tracks' extended titles offer some clues to the band's inspirations, helping listeners better follow the narrative, but ultimately the listener is asked to let their imagination guide them. Track by track, the atmosphere is solemnly built and the sense of suggestion fed, sketching out boundless abstract tableaux and whispering unfathomable secrets.
The cover art, painted by Kaneko Tomiyuki, is splendid and evocative. More than an album, an experience. A possible heir to "At The Mountains Of Madness" (2005) by the Electric Masada project, likewise performed with two drummers and equally colossal.

Altri documenti live: “Solar Drone Ceremony”, “Set Chaos To The Heart Of The Moon” e “Finis Gloriae Mundi“

It's clear that, regardless, the band can't do without the live dimension. Following the epic triple album Éons, more documents of their ritual-concerts arrive. Solar Drone Ceremony (2021) is a single long composition of over 52 minutes, which reworks the sprawling creativity of the previous year's masterpiece into a more compact, mystical form, decidedly less tied to heavy metal. The best key to understanding it seems to be its evocative, disturbing cover art, with its Lovecraftian tones and an abundance of detail that invites close scrutiny, as if to decipher its hidden meanings.
In the first few minutes the cosmic dimension of the ceremony is clear, somewhere between Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, anticipating a shadowy dark-jazz, fused with a psychedelic ritual that only around the thirteenth minute reaches a power comparable to metal. Suffocating drones push Pink Floyd toward the hypnotic atmospheres of Sunn O))), before a dark, tribal rite is intoned, celebrated by a voice reverbed to grotesque effect. After about thirty minutes, the pace halves, letting the brass flutter as a long free-jazz climax builds, concluding at the fortieth minute. A long run-up launches the finale into a jazz-metal charge propped up by drones and acidic slime, crashing into a liberating closing orgy.
Clearly built for the live dimension, and indeed recorded live just before the pandemic hit in March 2020, Solar Drone Ceremony lacks the unchecked ambition of its predecessor, from which it strips away the most extreme aspects and cyclopean proportions, but it still manages to grip and beguile. Within the lush arrangements lurks a horrible decay, a luxuriant rot that stuns the senses and triggers visions. Wrapped in this menacingly esoteric ceremony, one remains hypnotized by a mutant fusion of jazz, drone, psychedelia and metal that Neptunian Maximalism handle with tremendous creativity.
Certainly not suited to distracted listening, nor recommended to anyone looking for a tune to hum along to, Solar Drone Ceremony belongs among music's great apocryphal masses, a cursed and forbidden ritual that bewitches, stuns, and terrifies.

In 2022 comes Set Chaos To The Heart Of The Moon. We find already-familiar tracks here, revisited in the context of the Dutch "Roadburn" festival in 2021. It's clear that in a live setting certain aspects would have been heightened in ways that can't be conveyed to someone who can only listen, as with the opening eight minutes of "Sustain".
A similar point applies to the following Finis Gloriae Mundi (also 2022), featuring a revised line-up: Guillaume Cazalet (amplified baritone guitar, sitar, voice), Jean Jacques Duerinckx (amplified baritone and sopranino saxophone), Reshma Goolamy (amplified bass), Romain Martini (amplified guitar), Didié Nietzsche (digital soundscapes, spectral), Joaquin Bermudez (amplified saz), Alice Thiel (synthesizer, gong, amplified guitar), Stephane Fedele (drums) and Lukas Melville Bouchenot (drums).

A new dedication to the Sun: Le Sacre Du Soleil Invaincu

Recorded in 2023 in the church of St John's On Bethnal Green in London, for the Judgment Hall Festival, Le Sacre Du Soleil Invaincu is a colossal sonic liturgy, a shamanic journey carved out of time and space. The collective, always devoted to exploring sonic and spiritual depths, immersed itself for four days in a liturgical session, forging a mystical bond with the building's architecture, energies and history. The result is a two-hour composition reworking three ragas from the Indian classical tradition (Marwa, Todi, Bairagi), filtered through the band's usual radical, multifaceted approach: a hybrid of cyclopean drones worthy of Sunn O))), boundless cosmic psychedelia, Eastern suggestions and metal power.

"At Dusk: Raag Marwa" is split into four parts. In the first, the Sun's last reflections flicker as shapeless, sepulchral vibrations, before a galactic night majestically bursts forth, taking shape at the end of a sacral tension. The electric guitar becomes the cyclopean messenger of the ritual's beginning through its boundless drones, adorned with brass and synths. It's a slow unspooling that ends as drums and an Indian melody usher in the second part. The pace gradually accelerates, in a crescendo that midway through also folds in distant ritual voices and psychedelic slime before a blues solo of stellar proportions. The third part is more like a hymn, closer to the idea of a song, even though it sounds like a march made of zeuhl and metal, somewhere between Electric Wizard and Tangerine Dream. Dream, meanwhile, is the space of action for the fourth and final part, otherworldly chords and tellurian drones, cinematic blockbuster orchestrations joined with reverbs and echoes of sonic hallucination that might recall the Vladislav Delay of "Anima" merging with the more unsettling Angelo Badalamenti.
"Arcana XX: Raag Todi" is split into three parts. The first, over 16 minutes long, is built around the traditional sounds of Indian music, like Stephen Micus's "Implosions", but pointed toward contact with other dimensions. The instruments mimic voice and lament, suggesting trumpeting roars and dirges amid tense tolling. What follows is an assault in the form of a superhuman war chant, a dance where the drums drive the charge of a black metal piece with Glenn Branca-like ascents and free vocalizations. An obsessive, labyrinthine interlude leads into the final part, a dark tension in the form of psychedelic fusion metal.
The more homogeneous "At Dawn: Raag Bairagi" is far less tense: it lingers in a long psychedelic blues solo, before the priestly voice arrives to guide the invocation, and the piece dwells a touch too long in the jam; the third part is broken up by a suffocating guitar riff, otherworldly screamed voices and fresh spatial hallucinations; it closes with eleven minutes of tolling bells, boundless reverb and traditional instruments.
Le Sacre Du Soleil Invaincu is a monumental, spiritual work, where the pursuit of sound becomes transcendence. Compared to the Belgians' previous releases, there's less jazz and prog-rock, and the Indian tradition takes center stage. It demands patience and concentration, an almost sacred kind of listening: you have to surrender to the journey, step out of daily life's frantic rhythms for 98 minutes and gaze into your inner cosmos. You might even come out the other side a little changed.

The monstrous serpent god: Nāgabhūtaṃ

Nāgabhūtaṃ (2026, from nāga, meaning serpent, and bhūtaṃ, meaning to become) is an entirely improvised black-magic ritual, held on stage at Botanique in Brussels on April 9, 2025. The composition is split into 11 tracks totaling 42 minutes and is titled "Devānām Madhye Nāgabhūtaṃ Dṛṣṭvā Te Bibhyati", which can be translated as "Among the gods, at the sight of the one who has become a serpent, they are afraid".
Sébastien Schmit (drums), Dirk Wachtelaer (drums, gong), Jean Jacques Duerinckx (baritone and sopranino saxophone) and Guillaume Cazalet (baritone electric guitar, otamatone, voice) open with a mysterious saxophone and a monstrous voice. The ritual slowly grows more tense and unsettling, until it takes the shape of a hypnotic tribal dance. In the third part a limping gait darkens the atmosphere even further, generating a frightening, abnormal jazz-metal, made even more alien in the fourth part, with surges of distorted guitar and finally a mournful vocal invocation that carries over into the shadowy fifth part. Amid cacophonous fragments and unnerving double-bass-drum assaults, a Tibetan chant rises like a cosmic lament, the voice of a monster worthy of Lovecraft.
The tension doesn't let up in the sixth part, built on an obsessive, increasingly frantic metallic beat. The fragments that follow the explosion are free-jazz debris that turn into cosmic hallucinations in the eighth part, a drone merged with a Venusian raga. A lively, percussion-driven dance slowly thickens like a storm cloud in the ninth part, leading to the galactic thunder of the tenth. The monstrous apparition emerges from the fog, majestic and suffocating, as suggested by the distorted drones and deafening bass. The instruments scream at the abomination, the percussion unleashes a tempest, the voice howls, monstrous and cyclopean. The finale is a feverish, unleashed infernal climax, a free-jazz-metal at insane speed that brings the abominable ritual to a close.
Nāgabhūtaṃ distills the band's sound but pushes it in a partly new direction: the sun invocations of their early days have become galactic rituals, then merged with transcendent ragas, generating a musical language that has now turned esoteric and dark. It's their most gloomy and frightening composition, as fascinating as the aberrant imagery it conjures up.

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