For two decades, the Paris-based ensemble Ghost Rhythms has been building a musical universe that refuses to stay inside conventional genre boundaries. Their latest release, Missing Times, is perhaps their most ambitious statement yet: a sprawling, beautifully constructed tour-de-force that draws equally from jazz, classical music, rock and world music while exploring ideas of time, perception, absence and the enduring mystery of UFOs.
Active in Paris since 2005, Ghost Rhythms has become one of the most distinctive post-genre ensembles on the international scene. The nine-piece collective has won numerous awards and released nine albums, developing a sound defined by morphing drum grooves, infectious bass lines, constantly shifting harmonies, world-music inflections and dizzying odd-meter polyrhythms. The result is music that can be intellectually intricate without sacrificing melody, movement or emotional immediacy.
Missing Times, their third album for Cuneiform Records, takes its conceptual starting point from one particularly strange aspect of UFO mythology: reports of alleged abductees losing their memories of what happened during their supposed encounters. For drummer and guitarist Xavier Gélard, however, the extraterrestrial mythology is ultimately only the doorway into something much more human. As he puts it, the goal was to “decolonize the UFO lore from the UFO” in order to reach the human experience underneath it.
That makes Missing Times less an album about spaceships than an album about disappearance, memory and perception. Those ideas are embedded directly into the music, with rhythmic structures continually shifting and interlocking in ways that challenge the listener’s sense of musical time. Gélard and pianist Camille Petit form the creative center of Ghost Rhythms, and throughout the ensemble’s 20-year history they have explored the relationship between interlocking rhythms and musical feel. On Missing Times, that investigation becomes central to the album’s identity.
Most of the record was recorded live in the studio, and its compositions grew organically from the album’s initial title and concept. Petit describes reaction as a fundamental part of his writing process: musical sections, counterpoints and structural ideas emerge by listening to what has already been created and responding to it. That approach helps explain the remarkable sense of motion throughout the album. Nothing feels static for long. Grooves mutate, melodies rise out of dense textures, and individual instrumental colors suddenly alter the perspective of an entire passage.
The ensemble’s influences are equally wide-ranging. Ghost Rhythms can evoke the rhythmic sophistication of John Hollenbeck’s Claudia Quintet and the genre-blurring instincts of The Bad Plus, while also drawing on progressive-rock innovators such as National Health and the adventurous chamber-rock and avant-prog worlds of Lars Hollmer/Von Zamla, Art Zoyd and Miriodor. Yet Missing Times never feels like an exercise in stylistic collage. The various influences are absorbed into a distinctive collective language of its own.
The album’s opening track, “Quinta del Sordo,” establishes that atmosphere immediately. The piece takes its inspiration from the house where Spanish artist Francisco Goya created his infamous “Black Paintings” in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. A growing dissonance moves through the composition, creating a feeling of activity and unease while simultaneously evoking isolation and loss. Gélard connects that emotional dimension to Goya’s increasing deafness and the loneliness that accompanied it, turning a historical reference into a deeply personal meditation on absence.
“Agatha” draws on another disappearance, this time the mysterious 11-day vanishing of author Agatha Christie in 1926. Ghost Rhythms transforms the story into a piece of shifting cinematic grandeur, pairing a noir-inflected melody with soaring chorus and strings. Driving grooves continually change underneath the composition before giving way to a soulful middle section supporting Petit’s plaintive, lyrical piano solo.
Elsewhere, the UFO theme becomes especially vivid on “Aux Grand Absents,” where wordless voices soar above a complex multi-meter rhythmic foundation. Accordion enters with a lighter, almost playful energy, redirecting the listener yet again. The contrast between weight and buoyancy is one of the album’s defining strengths: Ghost Rhythms can make incredibly sophisticated rhythmic music feel inviting, melodic and alive.
The title track takes a different approach. “Missing Times” develops gradually, with Petit’s lonely piano occupying the foreground as the surrounding sound becomes a mysterious investigation into absence itself. It is a strikingly restrained moment on an album otherwise full of rhythmic activity, and that contrast gives the record much of its emotional power.
At the center of the album, track seven, “Vie de Betty and Barney Hill,” is the record’s one lyric-driven composition. Inspired by the famous alleged UFO abduction of Betty and Barney Hill, the piece sounds almost like an imagined meeting between Robert Wyatt and Syd Barrett, with lonely nylon-string guitar arpeggios and strings creating a fragile, dreamlike atmosphere. Its presence might seem unexpected on such an ensemble-focused instrumental record, but it ultimately serves as a crucial point of cohesion, tying the album’s ideas of memory, mystery and human vulnerability together.
That ability to make conceptual music feel emotionally immediate is what makes Missing Times so compelling. The UFO mythology is only one layer. Beneath it are more universal feelings of longing, isolation, uncertainty and the fear of losing something—or someone—that cannot be recovered. In that sense, the album’s thematic territory connects naturally with music as seemingly distant from Ghost Rhythms as Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here: both use absence as a means of exploring the emotional spaces left behind when something disappears.
Musically, Ghost Rhythms are an extraordinarily well-drilled unit, but there is nothing mechanical about their precision. The constantly evolving rhythmic textures create the sensation of a musical organism in motion, with every player contributing to an expansive, interconnected sound. The ensemble includes Guillaume Aventurin on guitar, Julien Bigorgne on flute, Alexis Collin on accordion, Nadia Mejri-Chapelle on cello and vocals, Xavier Gélard on drums, Grégory Kosovski on bass, Morgan Lowenstein on congas, Camille Petit on piano and Rhodes, Maxime Thiébaut on alto and tenor saxophones, Bertrand Aimar on violin, Maxime Berton on soprano saxophone, and Frédéric Garcia as choir director.
The result is an album that is simultaneously intricate and accessible, cerebral and deeply melodic. Missing Times can be approached as modern jazz, chamber music, progressive rock, experimental composition or simply as the work of an ensemble that has stopped worrying about where one genre ends and another begins. Its rhythmic architecture rewards close listening, while its melodies, grooves and cinematic atmosphere provide an immediate way into the music.
Ghost Rhythms have spent 20 years developing the language that makes this possible. On Missing Times, that language reaches a particularly vivid point of expression: an expansive, darkly cinematic and often beautiful record in which jazz, chamber music, rock, world music and progressive experimentation become parts of a single musical landscape. The subject may be UFOs, but the deeper subject is human perception—the things we remember, the things we lose, and the strange spaces that exist between the two.
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