Ulan Bator: "Evra Kedebra"

From the LP ABRACADABRA, Ulan Bator is a French experimental post-rock band founded in 1993 by Amaury Cambuzat and Olivier Manchion. They got their name from Ulan Bator, the capital city of Mongolia. “I didn’t want to provoke but rather to suggest.” Your latest project is called “I Feel Like A Bombed Cathedral”. It’s quite a provocative name, don’t you think? What’s the concept behind this project? Amaury Cambuzat: The words “Bomb” and “Cathedral” sound strong, I know. Violence and religion being apparently opposed in the minds of many. I didn’t want to provoke but rather to suggest. It expresses a moment in my life when I felt the need to find a metaphor to define my state of mind in a society where everyone has to be strong, winning, pleasant and able to define themselves in one word, I deliberately wanted to take a long and uncomfortable name that perfectly reflected what I wanted to express. A scream, certainly vain but, a cry of distress in the face of our declining society. You will notice that, in the Selfies Era, I started this project by hiding my face under a djellaba’s hood. This is my way of manifesting in the face of this self-celebration that surrounds us daily. We live in an apparently free society but in which many taboos still remain. By choosing this name, I was blocked on IG from the start. That did not surprise me. Their algorithm being extremely puritanical. Finally, there is also a poetic or romantic (?) connotation for me because this name sounds like a work by Claude Debussy that I love: La Cathédrale Engloutie. The project is fairly new but you already have three releases available. Would you like to discuss what can we hear on these releases and what are the differences between them? I started working on this project in May 2019. I was indeed immediately motivated and therefore very productive and I have released three albums on three different labels in a very short period of time. The common denominator between these three records and the fact that they are instrumental improvisations but they are all different. The first ‘AmOrtH’ released on the English label Dirter Promotions is very atmospheric. It opens with a piece lasting 43 minutes. You’re also part of post-2004 Faust with Jean-Hervé Peron and Werner ‘Zappi’ Diermaier. How did you first got in touch with their music? Were they influential to Ulan Bator? It was their ‘Rien’ LP (1994) produced by Jim O’Rourke that started it all. We (Ulan Bator) started collaborating with them in 1996 after the release of our second album Ulan Bator ‘2°’. We were initially called Collectif Metz because our first live collaboration took place in the French city of Metz. This collective was composed of Jean-Hervé Peron & Zappi Diermaier (Faust) + Olivier Manchion and myself (Ulan Bator). Then, before the recording of our LP “‘Végétale’, we gave a proper tour in France: Ulan Bator (trio) with Faust. These concerts were divided into two parts. The first was a 40-minute concert of Ulan Bator and the second part, a concert of Faust which included us (Ulan Bator) as musicians of Faust. Here is an excerpt from one of these concerts from this tour where French artist Pascal Comelade