Ezel - La Steppe aux deux Soleils

 

 

Ezel - La Steppe aux deux Soleils
Self-released - 2024
Drone, Doom
Rated: ****1/2

Have you ever craved for discomfort? Sitting on a chair in the middle of an empty room, the walls shivering like mad and producing a low-end rumble that can only originate from the deepest and darkest pits of the human brain? The illusion of not having any illusions at all - just an empty, desolate feeling - here, in the now, in a place where you don't want to be, but which you don't want to leave either because it's so fucking intriguing? That's more or less the atmosphere being created by Brussels three-piece Ezel on their first album of experimental drone and doom, available on cassette and as a digital download. Two tracks in little under forty minutes where slow, pounding drums and baritone saxophone lay a steady, trembling foundation for a heavily distorted violin to weave exquisite patterns of pain and repulsion, attraction and joy with a middle eastern undertone - not one where the room is filled with graceful belly dancers with smooth hips and bell chains around their wastes, but one where stench rises from a long-forgotten opium den - people resting on the fumes of self-destruction with an inability to love or feel, drifting off into the imagination of emptiness and abandonment, slowly coming to terms with the world around them.

More so than their use of non-conformist instrumentation, it's that contradiction, that undercurrent, that dark, brooding ultra-heaviness that makes Ezel so special. That world where two suns exist. One shining bright, the other black as the night. Together they illuminate the ground beneath them - that desolate place where everything is beautiful, yet nothing dares to grow.

(Written by Ronny Dijksterhuis)

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