Utopic Sporadic Orchestra - Nancy 1975 documents an evening that had long hovered at the edge of legend. In October 1975, during the “Nancy Jazz Pulsations” festival, Jannick Top assembled an eighteen‑piece ensemble - the Utopic Sporadic Orchestra - for what was, in effect, his first appearance as the leader of a large group. The occasion gave him the chance to publicly present his 1970s masterpiece De Futura under his own name, in a version that pushed the piece’s Zeuhl DNA into fully orchestral territory. Long whispered about and scarcely heard, this recording stands as an extremely rare trace of that night, a snapshot of a moment when French electric jazz, rock avant‑garde and classical discipline collided around one of the era’s most visionary bass players.
De Futura has since become a cult work, echoing through decades of underground music. Its hulking bass architecture and apocalyptic momentum remain a touchstone not only for Magma devotees but also for Japanese underground bands who have carried fragments of it into their own repertoires in recent years. Here, freed from the confines of a studio and expanded for a large ensemble, the piece appears in a particularly developed orchestral form. Two drum kits - Jean Schultheis and Christian Vander - and Chris Stassinopoulos on percussion drive a rhythmic engine that swings between martial ceremony and volcanic free‑thrash. Above, keyboards by Jean‑Pierre Sabartet, Gérard Bikialo, Philippe Briche and Georges Gasky thicken the harmony into glowing, dissonant blocks, while guitars from Denys Lable and Josselin Piccende score the surface with distorted filigree. Strings - Didier Lockwood and Michel Ripoche on violins, Hervé Derien on cello, Sauveur Mallia on fret cello, plus Mohamed Larbi Ouchni on African violin - stretch the music toward something like a brutalist chamber orchestra, a mass of bowed tension wrapped around Top’s bass.
Vocals from Frédérique Gegembach, Stella Vander and Martine Toureil add another essential layer, transforming the ensemble into a kind of temporary choir. Their lines do not offer conventional lyric clarity so much as ritual colour, riding the currents of De Futura in chants, cries and sustained tones that reinforce the music’s mythic dimension. At the centre of it all stands Jannick Top, his bass stalking the entire structure: sometimes anchoring the ensemble with monolithic ostinatos, sometimes erupting into snarling, overdriven motives that seem to tear new fault lines in the piece as it unfolds. The result is not simply a live run‑through but a re‑imagining, a version of De Futura that exposes its orchestral skeleton and its capacity to accommodate multiple, simultaneous narratives.
This edition situates the recording with care. Written by Jannick Top, the music is presented with new vinyl mastering and lacquers cut by François Terrazzoni at Parélies, giving the archival tape a renewed physicality without sanding away its grain. Executive production by Jimmy Top and Alain Lebon ensures that the release slots naturally into the ongoing retrieval of Zeuhl and related musics from the 1970s underground. The package is completed by artwork from Nicolas Camillini and photography by Michel Adda, whose images help reconstruct the atmosphere of that October night - musicians packed together on stage, lights catching cymbals and strings, an audience witnessing a work that would only grow in stature as the decades passed.
Heard now, Utopic Sporadic Orchestra - Nancy 1975 is more than an archival curiosity. It captures a rare instant when Jannick Top’s compositional vision and the collective power of a large ensemble were perfectly aligned, when De Futura could expand to fill every corner of a hall without losing its focus or menace. It is a document of a leader stepping fully into his own myth, and of a band made “utopic” and “sporadic” precisely because such a combination could not last - except, now, on this slab of vinyl.
