Ulysse - Projects

Ulysse Loup Large ensemble

Les amarres tombent (The Moorings Fall Away): thus begins the album 0°W, marking the start of a transatlantic sailing voyage, carried by a poem by Arthur Rimbaud and childhood memories.

Composer and bassist Ulysse Loup brings together a large ensemble of ten musicians to set Le Bateau ivre (The Drunken Boat) to music. Two drum kits, two basses, one guitar, four horn players, and a vocalist take the audience on a journey through swells, sea spray, and ocean winds.

Blending aquatic textures, interwoven rhythms, long melodic lines, and improvisation, the ensemble creates a dialogue between contemporary jazz and surrealist poetry.

On stage, suspended old sails, fans, and a play of light recreate the illusion of a maritime atmosphere.

A passionate sailor, Ulysse has already crossed the Atlantic under sail three times. After Apilaptok, a debut trio album recounting an expedition to Greenland, and Dualité cohérente (Coherent Duality), centered on the Far North, he now chooses to set the mythical Atlantic crossing to music.

"Que j'aille à la mer" ("Let me go to the sea"), the final cry of Le Bateau ivre, also becomes the last track of the album.

The album will be released on November 21, 2025 on Unit Records.

Rimbaud's poem recounts the surreal odyssey of a boat in search of freedom—tired of floating, longing to sink. Departing from an American river, it narrates its drifting toward Europe. Written in the wake of the failure of the Paris Commune, the text resonates like a melancholic song of revolt, carried by a ship intoxicated with water.

0°W sets this dreamlike voyage to music, intertwining it with a sensory experience of the sea. Its structure is directly inspired by the poem, with several quatrains excerpted and sung. One of the most powerful moments is embodied by these lines:

Mais, vrai, j'ai trop pleuré ! Les Aubes sont navrantes. (But truly, I've wept too much! Dawns are heart-breaking.)
Toute lune est atroce et tout soleil amer : (Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter:)
L'âcre amour m'a gonflé de torpeurs enivrantes. (Acrid love has filled me with drunken torpor.)
Ô que ma quille éclate ! Ô que j'aille à la mer ! (Oh, let my keel burst! Oh, let me go to the sea!)

Baritone saxophone, trombone, and flugelhorn echo the sound of foghorns. The drums lay down a slow, deep pulse, accompanying the ship's peaceful shipwreck. Flute, voice, and guitar bring the piece to a close with a series of melodic descents, underpinned by the dark hum of the brass.

Ulysse's music always draws from the experience of sailing — a true common thread in his work. Having left at age 10 for a voyage across the Atlantic, he remains deeply connected to the sea. His compositions often arise from recordings of sailboats tacking between icebergs or images of the midnight sun, striving to capture the feeling of navigation.

0°W explores the emotions of a crossing: Pleine Mer (Open Sea) conveys the stress of a storm, Un noyé descend (A Drowned Man Sinks) evokes the solitude of a windless calm, and Hystérique (Hysterical) embodies the excitement of departure, when the coastline disappears and only the horizon remains.

Following Apilaptok — a musical logbook born of a residency on a sailboat in Greenland — and Dualité cohérente, a sonic narrative of the Far North and Estonia, 0°W extends this inner odyssey. Ulysse lets the echoes of an ocean he knows intimately resound.

Line-up:
Ulysse Loup: Electric bass & composition
Damaris Brendle: Voice
Ludmilla Mercier: Flute & spoken words
Mireia Pellisa Martín: Alto & baritone saxophone
Paul Butscher: Trumpet & flugelhorn
Pere Molines Tur: Trombone
Anna Kalk: Guitar
Benjamín Jaton: Double bass
Flo Hufschmid: Drums
Damien Kuntz: Drums & percussions

Album: 0°W (released Nov 2025 on unit records)

Singles on Bandcamp (full album coming soon):
Pleine Mer
Que j'aille à la Mer

Loup / Heid

Ulysse Loup and Darius Heid explore the microscopic sound qualities that arise in the space between their musical gestures.

Calm yet charged with tension, they guide listeners through evolving sonic landscapes where acoustic and electronic elements merge with the room's resonance to form a single, breathing organism.

With a deep focus on texture, timbre, and the narrative potential of sound, LOUP/HEID invites the audience into a world of fragile equilibrium — one that can shift suddenly, revealing new shapes, moods, and unexpected intensities.

Their music unfolds between composition and improvisation, balancing stillness and movement, clarity and distortion, the familiar and the unknown.

Ulysse draws inspiration from the soundscapes he captured during his travels in Greenland, while Darius is deeply influenced by the meditative flow of Zen movement.

They also love to perform in unusual and evocative locations — for instance, they have presented a sound installation and concert in an old prison in Copenhagen — and often invite different musicians to join them, such as Danish drummer Peter Bruun.

Line-up:
Darius Heid: Piano & objects
Ulysse Loup: Electric bass & prep

Video: Loup / Heid Live in Vridsløselille (DK)

Noblique

We don't know if it was fate that guitarist Anna Kalk from Estonia, bassist Ulysse Loup from Geneva and drummer Damien Kuntz from France met in Bern or if it was just pure chance. In any case, they improvised together and, from the very first sessions, they understood that they would continue together as a trio. Noblique combines different sound textures and is constantly searching for new sounds.

Noblique started as a free improvisation trio, yet quickly they found themselves developping an original repertoire.

Passionate about new ways to explore their instruments, and avant-garde music, their musical landscape reaches from intimate hang-in-time moments to explosive merciless improvisations.

Line-up:
Anna Kalk: Guitar
Ulysse Loup: Bass & Composition
Damien Kuntz: Drums

Album: Dualité Cohérente (Released Sept 23 on unit records)
Listen on Bandcamp
Live video: Premier Grain

Allure

Mechanical and organic, violent and calm, "Allure trio" feeds on these dualities.

Formed around the composer and bassist Ulysse Loup, the trio explores the world of contemporary jazz. Inspired by the sound textures of free improvisation, the strict writing of contemporary music and the many rhythms of jazz, the trio's music plays around stylistic boundaries. Navigating between strict writing and improvisation, the trio's primary objective is the search for "sound"

Their first album "Apilaptok" is set to release in February 2023. Written in Greenland, this album translates to music the great wild spaces that are sometimes calm but often violent.

Line-up:
Daniel Hernandez: Piano
Ulysse Loup: Bass & comp
Michael Cina: Drums

Album: Apilaptok (released Feb 2023)
Listen on Bandcamp

Après la Glace

Composers Ludmilla Mercier and Ulysse Loup and glaciologist Janosch Beer take us on a fictional journey to the icy world of Greenland.
Greenland has come under particular scrutiny in recent years due to climate change. The glaciers - as huge as they still are today - are gradually retreating, which has enormous consequences for the planet. Where will this lead?
Ulysse Loup and Ludmilla Mercier have been studying this unique world for a long time. For our event, they are bringing new images and sounds from Greenland, which they will process musically in the concert. The focus is on the breaking off of large ice masses, the so-called "calving", which is unusually loud and can trigger powerful tsunamis.
Janosch Beer is a glaciologist. He studies and works at the Laboratory of Hydraulics, Hydrology and Glaciology (VAW) at ETH Zurich. He specializes in the movement and collapse of alpine glaciers, but draws parallels with those in Greenland.
« Some time ago, we had this slightly crazy idea to sail by boat from Akeyuri Island to Nuuk, Greenland. A month aboard a 12-meter boat, exploring glaciers and recording sounds, images, to create « APRÈS LA GLACE » a piece for trio and performance together with the glaciologist Janosch Beer. »

Premiere at the Schlachthaus Theater for the Musikfestival Bern: Tuesday 5.9., 12.30 Uhr, Schlachthaus Theater, Saal

Line-up:
Ludmilla Mercier: Performance - direction
Ulysse Loup: Bass & composition
Daniel Hernandez: Piano
Michael Cina: Drums
Janosch Beer: Scientific presentation
Thomas Meyer: Moderation

FC Gnou

The show was born of a reading of François Cheng's 5 meditations on beauty, which the Swiss actor René Claude Emery wanted to confront with his sometimes compulsive practice of the tablet game Clash of Clans.

FC Gnou was performed as part of the impromptu.e.s program in Fribourg, and was then revived in Sion at the Place des Théâtres, La Grenette in Sion and Le Manoir in St-Maurice.

Trailer: Video link

Line-up:
René-Claude Emery: Voice and text
Ulysse Loup: Bass

Frei(t)raum

Oscillating between reality and absurdity, meditative calm and a rapid flood of images, apparent randomness and intuitively comprehensible meaning, Mercier and Loup asks: What lies within our dreams, and how do our longings manifest?
Through the interplay of intensely emotional new music, expressive contemporary dance, and light projections, the audience experiences a dreamlike performance that creates spaces for associations, thought experiments, and personal as well as collective desires.

Line-up:
Ludmilla Mercier: Artistic Direction, Performance
Ulysse Loup: Composition, Bass
Anna Kalk: Guitar
Damien Kuntz: Drums
Ursina Bösch: Choreography, Dance/Performance
Priscilla Roeck: Dance/Performance

Artistic residency Greenland / Kalaallit Nunaat summer 2024

Aboard the sailboat "Knut" for three weeks, we navigated between Illulisat and Nuuk along the west coast of Greenland. The crew consisted of four artists and a skipper. We explored the vast fjords that shape Greenland's coastline. The breathtaking landscapes unfolded one after another, revealing massive glaciers, charming small villages, and mountains plunging endlessly into the sea.

I had brought a microphone with me and recorded many soundscapes. A glacier crashing into the water, a colony of Arctic terns, a sailboat cutting through the ice, and the cracking of an iceberg are some examples of the sounds I could capture. I was able to use these recordings as tape in several compositions that narrate this expedition

Newspaper articles:
L'Illustré
La Tribune de Genève
Marémotrice Association

Pictures ©Benjamin Ruffieux

Artistic residency Estonia / November 2023

We traveled to Laossina, Estonia, with the group Noblique to work on the album Dualité Cohérente. I had the chance to compose music in a vast forest in the southeast of the country. Tracks like Arbore and Keraamiline Kass are deeply infused with this sylvan experience.

After preparing the pieces, we had the opportunity to perform in the capital, Tallinn. This led to the creation of the track Electric Postman, inspired by the robotic mail carriers delivering packages.

Upon returning to Switzerland, we quickly went into the studio to record the album Dualité Cohérente. The album reflects the duality between an industrial world and nature, much like the image of Noblique -a power trio- in an Estonian forest.

Listen to Dualité Cohérente:
Bandcamp
Premier Grain Live-video

Artistic residency Iceland - Greenland / Kalaallit Nunaat summer 2018

Embarking from Akeyuri in Iceland, we sailed for seven days to reach southern Greenland. After crossing the Ikerasassuaq/Prins Christians Sund Strait in the south of the country, we traveled northward to the capital, Nuuk. Along the way, we made stops in several villages: Aappilattoq, Nanortaliq, and Qaqortoq.

This residency was a profoundly impactful expedition for me, directly inspiring several projects. I kept a logbook during the journey, which later became an album: Apilaptok. It was my first experience in the Far North, and this expedition continues to influence my compositions.

Different compositions inspired by this journey:
Après la Glace
Apilaptok, Allure
Noblique, Dualité cohérente

Website Marémotrice