« […] Three drummers, two bass guitars, keyboards, guitar, bass trumpet, four saxophones and a clarinet, with two doubling on vocals -13 people (at my count) crammed onto a small stage, all wearing bizarrely appliqued anti-hero masks.

     Some of them are crouching as we come in, others hulked over their instruments, still more towering at the back of the stage – a mob equal parts friendly and frightening. Even before they start playing there is a strong complicity with the audience. Everyone knows what they have come here for. Made up of a collective of highly trained improvisors, 2035 have gathered a Parisian following well beyond the world of improv.

     The set opens with a solitary tenor saxophone call from the back of the stage, two tense notes repeated until the room’s taut. Then the deluge : the band’s immense weight descends en masse to form a torrential downpour of interlocking parts. Somehow it’s both clarity and chaos. The rhythmic and harmonic density never turns to mush. Instead, the whole band is pure propulsion.

     Scarcely a melody in sight, the many horns become cogs in a machine, each one often playing the simplest of single note phrases that ricochet off each other to create convulsive atonal patterns. It sounds like a peripatetic Haitian rara band crossed with Steve Reich.

     But other spectres rise up amid the music’s terrifying trance. In scale, this is almost like Henry Threadgill’s Society Situation Dance Band; in its angular harmonic frenzy it evokes Ornette’s Prime Time, and at the same time it puts its own spin on the contemporary trance impulse found in groups as diverse as Natural Information Society, Ghosted and [Ahmed]. The sheer number of instruments raises the stakes, but volume alone is not the trick. It’s the distribution of volume emanating from distinct sound sources that intensifies the hypnotism.

     Dark humour is also a distinguishing feature. Over the rumbling grooves come gurgling Auto-Tuned lyrics. At one point, still near the beginning of the set, the whole band wave au revoir to numerous scourges and the audience.

     This is the kind of music people could really march to – less lock step and more limping like Legba, one foot in the street, the other (sous les pavés) on the beach. With their masks they look ready for a riot, and I can almost imagine the whole thing spilling out of Cirque Electrique onto the peripherique (‘blockeverything’ being the latest French social movement). But perhaps most intriguing is the fact that 2035 – even with all their danceability- do not simply build to ever higher climaxes.

     Noise sometimes gives way to shimmering horns, irregular funk basslines and magnificent keyboard solos à la Eddie Palmieri.
The end is not an accelerated cacophony but rather a strange slow down. Instead of vainglorious triumph, the band employ their enormous powers to orchestrate a form of musical fatigue – a serenade for the exhausted of the earth. »

Gabriel Bristow Printed for The Wire from The Wire – December 2025 (Issue 502)