Univers Zero
Ceux De Dehors

Early '80s, years of great musical changes, a tough period for people like me, who are obsessed with progressive, krautrock, and zeuhl, accused of listening to irreparably old music and constantly made fun of by new wave and post punk friends.

One evening, a friend of mine comes over, mooches a coffee and a whiskey, and before leaving, with a look of disdain, lays a vinyl on the table saying: here, I was gifted this but I hate it, you'll surely like it with your crappy taste, bye.

The vinyl in question is "Ceux De Dehors" from 1981, by a phantom Belgian group, Univers Zero. Most of the tracks are signed by someone named Daniel Denis, who plays drums and percussion on the record. I am pleased by the similarity with Christian Vander of the beloved Magma and, intrigued, I place the vinyl on the turntable and listen to the first track, "Dense." I am fascinated and bewildered already after the first notes of this track. The music these insane Belgians make doesn't remotely resemble anything I've listened to before; it is a sort of electroacoustic instrumental music where, relying on a powerful and imaginative rock-influenced rhythm base, various horns, violins, violas, and keyboards intersect and overlap in a continuous variation of times and countertimes, consonances and dissonances, silences, and cacophonies.

Astonishment increases with the second track "La Corne Du Bois Des Pendus." Here the atmosphere becomes decidedly darker and more dramatic, spectral violins, organ chords that seem like the trumpets of the Apocalypse, choirs and lamentations of lost souls are the fundamental features of a very "visual" track that projects the mind into the deepest circle of hell. The other tracks on the album are equally remarkable, with a special mention for the short "La Musique De Erich Zann." Erich Zann is the protagonist of a story by H.P. Lovecraft, forced to play the viola constantly because this is the only way to keep out a horrendous "thing" pressing to enter through the window. The track conveys the same anguish as the poor player who, mad with terror and at his wit's end, vainly tries to oppose the inevitable.

Naturally, after this listening, I also purchased the previous albums by Univers Zero, "1313" from 1977 and "Heresie" from 1979, works that don't differ much from "Ceux De Dehors" but that are perhaps even darker and "harder," then I continued to follow them and buy their subsequent works, "Uzed" from 1984, "Heatwave" from 1986 (where synthesizers also make an appearance), both splendid and perhaps more modern and "accessible" (in quotes) than the first 3 albums. This will then be followed by a long period of silence, and indeed their next work "The Hard Quest" is from 1999, followed by "Rhythmix" from 2002 and "Implosion" from 2004. These are 3 interesting and enjoyable works, in which Univers Zero gradually abandon the long suite tracks of their previous albums in favor of the "song" form, but which denote a certain repetitiveness and a drop in compositional tension that, in my opinion, make them inferior to their previous works. Exceptions are "The Crawling Wind" released in 2000, which, however, consists of tracks composed in 1983 (perhaps from the "Ceux De Dehors" sessions) and the live album from 2006.

In these more than 30 years of Univers Zero's career, the true irreplaceable soul of the group has been and still is Daniel Denis, a very technical and imaginative drummer, around whom all the other musicians have revolved.

A great band then, whose music is hard to label, and indeed, to describe it, complex rock bands like King Crimson, Gentle Giant, Magma, and classical composers like Varese, Stravinsky, and Bartok have been brought into play, but they are probably comparable only to the French Art Zoyd, another great alternative band that surely deserves more consideration and prominence. Also here on DeBaser. Cheers.