MAXIME DENUC - Club Imperiale

For years, Club Imperiale was the beating heart of Pisan nightlife and of the whole Tuscan hinterland — and, truth be told, of Italian nightlife too. The French electronic composer Maxime Denuc, based in Brussels, decided to name his work of "speculative historical science fiction", as he likes to call it, precisely in homage to that legendary club, on an album that imagines "a point of creative symbiosis between the Catholic Church and the ecstatic dancefloors of the early 1990s".
To pull off this absurd leap of imagination, Denuc employed a pipe organ controlled via midi, in an attempt to transport the listener into a hypothetical nightclub deconsecrated by time, by the fashions of the moment and, perhaps, even by God.

Ten pieces make up this phantasmagoric vision of Denuc's, one that unfurled before his eyes after watching a video sent to him by a Belgian fan, showing a wedding in a church in Minorca, with the organist playing "Infinite End", the lead track from "Nachthorn", Denuc's 2022 album. A surprising gift, which the musician took as the long-awaited coded message needed to bring new music into being.

Once he'd picked up on the signal, the artist imagined what came after the event: remote villages to visit, forgotten cliffs to look out from, eventually winding up in a small-town nightclub, before finally stretching out on the beach to watch the sunrise.
Lending weight to this singular evocative pull is the relationship Denuc built with the church of Sant'Antonio in Düsseldorf, where, four days a month for a year, Maxime went to record the album, working from morning to evening, breaking off only for Mass, before finally committing everything to tape in the studio on his days off.

With the necessary — and lengthy — preamble on the genesis of "Club Imperiale", as bizarre as it is captivating, now out of the way, the ten movements that make it up follow through on that underlying intent at every turn, moving between a looped hallucination ("Hallucinogen") in the manner of Caterina Barbieri — who, as it happens, releases the record on her own Light-years label — through utterly ecstatic ambient stasis, in the vein of Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, as heard on "Atlantis", lively forays into Glassian minimalism ("La Paloma") — hinting at the work's wandering spirit — and cosmic flights toward the infinite horizon of a (trans)figured ocean ("Sueños"). And then there's the subtle minimalism of the Renaissance-tinged melody of "Plastes Figures", lending strength to the vision of a (post)-postmodern pied piper chasing an impossible, yet thoroughly successful, conceptual union.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

15/09/2026