- Eli Keszler flaunts his trademark avant-jazz sound on a new Roméo Poirier remix.
- Belgian musician Roméo Poirier's last album, 2022's Living Room, was a pristine exercise in trippy experimentation. Centered on arrhythmic samples, minimal synths and shifting tonalities, it played like the warped score to a restless fever dream (it makes sense that the record arrived via glitch legend Jan Jelinek's own faitiche imprint). Now, Poirier has commissioned a remix from kindred sonic spirit Eli Keszler, which arrives alongside a brand new track called "Les encombres."
The avant-percussionist flips Living Room's warm, earthy opener "Statuario" into nuanced leftfield jazz. Looped horns and strange piano glissandos lay the framework for deceptively simple cymbal shimmers and brushed flourishes, played between the toms and kick. Keszler's own recent remixes from duendita and Kode9 have found his intricate formula pushed into unusually structured terrain. But his rework of this Poirier cut is more characteristically oblique and withdrawn—a welcome return to form for the New York City artist and Downtown cool kid.