When two paths to ecstasy unexpectedly converged in the middle of the Mediterranean, Maxime Denuc’s Club Imperiale was born. Two years ago, the French composer was sent video footage of a bride and groom walking the aisle on the small Spanish island of Menorca, but it was the soundtrack, rather than the scenery, that made an impression: Instead of the standard nuptial accompaniment—Vivaldi, Bach, Celine Dion—the organist performed Denuc’s own “Infinite End,” a minimalist epic from his 2022 album Nachthorn.

Encountering his own music reverberating through the church’s majestic limestone arches, Denuc experienced a vision of gleaming whitewashed chapels perched above azure seas. But the Balearic connection also brought to mind more profane associations: namely, the Mediterranean discotheques of yore, many of them now falling to pieces, and the pulse-raising trance and techno that once flourished in them.

The dancefloor-as-church metaphor is not a particularly novel conceit. But, as a specialist in MIDI-controlled pipe organs, Denuc had an ace up the sleeve of his frock: He would run the key tropes of classic trance music—tumbling arpeggios, soaring counterpoints, earthshaking bass—through the grandest instrument he could get his hands on. He spent the next year at work in Düsseldorf’s St. Antonius Church, controlling the organ with a custom-designed Max/MSP sequencer, and availing himself of the building’s natural reverb to stretch his tones into a heavenly blur.

Much like dead malls in America, Europe’s crumbling nightclubs have inspired their own genre of ruin porn, of which Club Imperiale might be viewed as a particularly rose-tinted example. The album is named after a legendary club on the Tuscan coast, and many of its elements, if performed on an instrument like the Roland JP-8000, would be indistinguishable from the most ecstatic rave anthems of the early 1990s. In Denuc’s hands, though, they’ve been pulverized and smeared into a hazy state of ecstatic longing.

On the opening track, Denuc cribs directly from his source material: The central riff of “Hallucinogen” mimics a tumbling arpeggio at the heart of Hallucinogen’s “LSD,” a 1994 classic by Shpongle’s Simon Posford. But where the Hallucinogen track is a riot of pounding drums and filtered 303s, Denuc strips away everything but the arpeggio, antic as a field of butterflies, along with graceful pads and a deep, descending bass. Structurally, it couldn’t be simpler, but the feel of the track is vivid and immersive, especially if you turn it up loud enough to appreciate the minuscule harmonic details that seem to sparkle like spice over the surface of Arrakis.

Each of Club Imperiale’s tracks offers a variation on the same essential theme. “La Paloma” pairs the whirling arpeggios of Philip Glass with the dotted-eighth stabs of Italian piano house. Denuc apparently created “Atlantis” by repeating millisecond-long notes and melting them into glacial drones, but you’d never know it from the way that reverb and hiss muddy the surface of the slow-moving behemoth. Peer into the roiling interiors of most of these tracks and you’ll find rapid-fire sequences churning away at speeds no human fingers could ever play. Given the liturgical trappings and ecstasy-soaked subject matter, it feels like Denuc is offering a glimpse of the mystical forces—God or math, take your pick—behind the universe’s rippling atomic makeup.

Club Imperiale is something of a one-trick pony; aside from slight shifts in tempo or structure, there’s not much to distinguish many of these tracks from one another, and they don’t evolve much once all the pieces are in place. But the repetition—both within individual tracks and across the album as whole—is also the point. Any more variation would knock you out of the trance state that Denuc is trying to achieve. And occasionally—on “Impreza,” the album’s penultimate track, for example—he hits upon a sequence so simple, and so emotionally trenchant, that it feels like you’ve been offered a glimpse of something transcendent: not just a clever riff on rave nostalgia, but a time machine that actually takes you there, to the thick of a dancefloor in a cliffside nightclub you’ve never visited but somehow know intimately anyway, where the sunrise glows orange through dry ice smoke.