ELI KESZLER - Eli Keszler

Venturing into the winding paths of Eli Keszler's already substantial discography means reckoning with a constant sense of wonder, losing your bearings only to find them again astride a sudden rhythmic sketch that seems to appear from nowhere. It means standing at the start of a long improvised journey, then surrendering to placid ambient tableaux, taking the road of the most subversive jazz, and then returning with all due clamor to beloved electroacoustic settings.

So what should we expect from a self-titled album, released after nearly twenty years of career? Once again the New York-based percussionist, composer and sound-artist takes another unexpected sidestep, and while steering his talent toward the more jazz-inflected side of his creativity, he coats it in a cinematic aura never heard before. Noir in the best Lynchian tradition, full of vocal contributions pushing his efforts toward unusual "pop" forms, "Eli Keszler" proves to be a dark, smoky affair, with impeccable atmospheric textures built with a curious narrative attitude. Because behind the curtain lies a soul still waiting to be discovered.

Compared to the evanescence of several previous efforts, Keszler here brings out the smoke machine, giving full rein to his most cinematic side, depicting spaces of elegant decadence (the acid drifts of "Wild Wild West," laced with guitars à la Chris Isaak), while also offering unusual dreamlike escapes toward a mystery waiting to be deciphered ("When I Sleep," its voice barely intelligible beneath threads of drums and layers of static). Everything gains substance, even when dealing with ghosts, with inner perceptions: with the help of his percussive expertise, even the most unsettling moments take on a new concreteness, a density that gives shape to nightmares, to the deepest darkness.

Over a drum'n'bass-flavored ostinato, "Ever Shrinking World" gives voice to an obsession that grows ever more oppressive, the fruit of an alienation that takes hold of its protagonist without a single vocal outburst. When noise does arrive, it's still faced as a new vision, a direction worth pursuing: over slow, Bristol-style beats, somewhere between Goldfrapp and Hooverphonic, "Low Love" condenses an anguish still to be mastered, a threat softened by a wall of strings.

Between suns that don't burn (the electroacoustic experiment of "Sun") and potential cosmic openings (the opening of "Stay"), Sofie Royer's voice is the center of gravity that shapes the course of the whole record even when it's absent. Suspended in a middle realm that looks to both Julee Cruise and Victoria Legrand, the vocalist perfectly expresses the sense of unease hidden within the tracks, the ambiguity of scenarios that don't seek resolution but rather ask to be left free to represent themselves, to display their own complexity. And so Eli Keszler steers his creative torments, feeding them all the doubt and drive they need, revealing in the process a finely tuned compositional sensibility. A way of giving new life to noir, while telling a bit of his own story too.

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10/01/2026