Hector Zazou has constructed a weird and wonderful musical universe over the years, thanks to a range of exciting collaborations with the likes of Bony Bikaye, Harold Budd, Sandy Dillon and avant-garde computer artist Bernard Caillaud. Zazou's latest album, L’Absence, revolves around two major themes: the musical art of fugueand the concept of absence. A fugue is a contrapuntal form of music with two or more melodies which enter successively in imitation of each other, as if they were "escaping and chasing one another," notes Zazou. The Belgian composer plays his own game of hide-and-seek on L'Absence, toying with notions of absence and presence. Zazou quotes a famous line from Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, when the writer recalls coming home one day and watching his mother's face before she had seen him. "I was present at my own absence," writes Proust. And that is exactly the sort of schizophrenic moment that Zazou attempted to recreate on L’Absence.

"I didn't want to feel too present in the creative process this time round," he says, "When I get too involved in the creative process, I feel like I'm getting bogged down and making things more complicated than they need to be. This time round I tried to keep out of my own way as much as possible. And the best way of doing that was trying not to be there!" At the same time the Belgian composer admits he was careful to keep the music on his album as accessible as possible – although he is not prepared to make too many compromises to cross over onto the musical mainstream. Pascal Obispo he is not!

The eleven tracks on L'Absence are masterpieces of minimalism and subtlety, Zazou working on the principle of "subtraction," rather than adding layer upon supplementary layer of sound like so many of his contemporaries. "I wanted to step back from things a bit on this album and leave the music free to give in to its worst instincts," he says. But make no mistake about it, L'Absence does not mark a radical break with his former work. "No, it's definitely me," grins Zazou. "When I listen to this album I recognise myself. If I'd wanted to disappear from things altogether, I'd have called in a producer and come up with a very different album," he says, "I simply decided to stand back from things a bit, that's all! I was very present on 12 (Las Vegas Is Cursed*), which I made at the end of the last millennium with Sandy Dillon. I tried to push my vision of things to the absolute limit on that album. But unfortunately it didn't go down at all well with the public, or even the media. That was a very painful experience for me!"

One of the things that makes L’Absence a more accessible work is the number of talented guest vocalists involved. These range from Nicola Hitchcock, Caroline Lavelle, Emma Stow and Edo to Asia Argento, Katrina Beckford and Lucrezia von Berger. "I didn't want to work with singers who were too well-known" admits Zazou, "They'd have ended up making their presence felt too much." Musically speaking, Zazou also tried to work towards arrangements that do not make their presence felt too much, either. "What I was aiming for was a sort of smooth electronised sound with a touch of originality," he says, "But I didn't want that originality to be too overwhelming!" This approach certainly paid off on a track like Elle est si belle, a Jean-Pierre Mader reworking of the 60s classic composed by Ronnie Bird and sung in French by Edo. The song could even find its place on the nation's airwaves, if programmers were prepared to open their ears to wider musical horizons for a change.

Zazou's ears have certainly been tuned in to wider horizons over the years. Indeed, in the course of his career he has worked with everyone from African musician Bony Bikaye in the 80s to John Cale, Bill Laswell, Harold Budd, and even Gérard Depardieu, in the 90s. On L'Absence Zazou turns to literature and cinema for inspiration. On one track he sets a dialogue from the opening scene of the Jean-Luc Godard classic Le Mépris to music, Asia Argento singing both Michel Piccoli and Brigitte Bardot's dialogue. "I love Le Mépris," enthuses Zazou, "That film has one of the best dialogues and the best scenarios in cinema history. You really have the sense of someone translating their thought process directly onto the screen, although I can't really say I know what Godard was thinking about! That's one of the things I respect about him, in fact." L'Absence ends on an intellectual note, too, with a track quoting extracts from Karl Marx's Manifesto. "That's a bit of a reaction to the current climate, the lack of global vision right now," says Zazou, "The protests you see on the streets these days are staged by civil servants, 'intermittents', intellectuals and scientific researchers. It's the equivalent of the shopkeepers' revolution Marx was talking about. I think the Marxist analysis of society is still very relevant, in fact. I guess it's something I hang on to without believing in 100%. That track actually stands separate from the rest of the album. There's a chunk of silence in between and that's deliberate. I intended it as a sort of knowing wink, not a full-on protest song à la Manu Chao."

As to the question of whether he has ever hooked up with his old accomplice, Bony Biyake, again, Zazou laughs, "No, I haven't seen Bony in ages. Maybe our paths will cross again one day. Maybe we'll end up in an old people's home together and there'll be so many of us old timers that we'll be able to stage a real revolution at last. It'll be like 'Old fogies of the world, unite!"

Hector Zazou L’absence (Taktic Music/EastWest/Warner) 2004

* released on Crammed Discs/Wagram