NEPTUNIAN MAXIMALISM, aka NNMM and its multiple “Arkestra” formulas, was initiated by multi-instrumentalist Guillaume Cazalet on guitar/bass and vocals with veteran saxophonist Jean Jacques Duerinckx in Brussels in 2018. The new triple album: Le Sacre Du Soleil Invaincu (LSDSI), produced with the support of the FWB and Le Botanique, mastered by James Plotkin, premiered at Roadburn 2024 and was released on April 11th, 2025 (I, Voidhanger Records).
Neptunian Maximalism
NEPTUNIAN MAXIMALISM, aka NNMM and its multiple “Arkestra” formulas, was initiated by multi-instrumentalist Guillaume Cazalet on guitar/bass and vocals with veteran saxophonist Jean Jacques Duerinckx in Brussels in 2018, during a residency with the two drummers Sébastien Schmit and Pierre Arese. The result of this encounter was a bifacial entity, sometimes calling for a primitive voodoo trance with percussive intonations, dominated by repetitive and explosive rhythm, threatening wild spirits emanating from a violent original chaos, sometimes towards a psychedelic meditation based on amplified drone music where time, harmony, the power of the tonic and its iridescent harmonics, weight, durability, ruin are explored aspects. All this was the result of a freely improvised musical process captured in 2 intense days.
From this residency was born their first EP, The Conference Of The Stars (2018), released on Homo Sensibilis Sounds, a powerful universal xpansion manifested by a slow, heavy and intense harmonic progression illuminated by a flamboyant sopranino saxophone. It will be followed by an epic trilogy album of 02h09min entitled ÉONS (2020) released on I, Voidhanger Records which remains the centerpiece of their discography as its radicality, its coherent diversity and its singularity finds no equal, mixing mystical and chaotic drone/doom metal, pachydermic free jazz, the whole animated by a cosmic and psychedelic energy imbued with primary forces, inhabited by spiritual and prophetic possessions, resulting in part from the editing, arrangement and post-production work of Guillaume and exalted by a cover signed by the Japanese monumental painter artist Kaneko Tomiyuki.
By exploring the evolution of the human species, they question the future of life on earth, the narrative of which is drawn in titles as evocative as they are hermetic, and whose expression takes shape through the use of speculative texts in prototypal Homo-sapiens language (Pierre Lanchantin), the attraction to philosophy, the academic path in architecture, history and plastic arts as well as a form of shamanic introspection aimed at the invocation of ancestral or inner animal identities. The collective ultimately attempts to create a feeling of acceptance of the end of the "Anthropocene" era through a soteriological musical experience.
In 2019, Guillaume undertook the creation of a larger line-up in order to restore the multiple musical layers resulting from the post production work of the first albums. Reshma Goolamy (bass), Romain Martini (guitar), Didié Nietzche (granular synthesis), Joaquín Bermudez (saz), Alice Thiel (keyboard), Stephane Fedele & Lukas Melville (drums) joined the project that takes the form of the "Arkestra". In June 2025, percussionist Marti Ilmar Uibo (Chaos Echoes), whose range extends from avant-garde metal to archaeo-music, took over as drummer.
