EDOUARD VAN PRAET

After two EPs that firmly established him in Belgium, Edouard van Praet now releases his debut album - Mascarades - the logical but daring continuation of his previous rock experiments ('Doors' in 2021, 'Cycles' in 2022). It features predominantly French vocals and an openness to assumed electronic sounds. Masquerades are those pretenses that attempt to hide or reveal an identity. By pushing them to their paroxysm, Edouard wishes to expose the deception: beyond musical genres, to drop arbitrary labels and reveal his musical identity in broad daylight, naked, without unnecessary embellishments. To peel back the layers to find the essential, and to accept that the same person can cover several parallel identities that form a whole greater than their sum.

For Edouard, musical creation is a huge playground. The result is an album
deliberately versatile, cheerfully blurring the lines, which puts us in front of a ballad whose influence comes straight from Tom Waits and Frank Sinatra as much as a degenerate gabber/trance sound. The bridge between these extremes is this alternative sound derived from rock, certainly, but which dares to go beyond its sometimes too rigid constraints.

On stage, Edouard lets loose, and therein lies the constant that transcends all his contrasts. Accompanied by his band of anti-rockers, he invites you to drink the cup and surrender to the trance. While it is indeed a quintet of rock musicians that we find on stage, this is only the first visible layer of a deeper reality.

We are facing a masquerade that hides a wild and intense show that will take you from folk rock to glam, from synthpop to techno trance, from mannered staging to total exposure.

At the center of this effervescence lurks a heterogeneous artist who has managed to absorb his multiplicities to regurgitate them into a personal synthesis, dropping the masks to better find what constitutes the heart of his identity.