There has been a strong inclination in my work to present listeners with uncommon sounds. One of the most faithful methods of doing so is to contextualize environmental ambience and electronic noise alongside musical instruments, like keyboards.

My work with keyboards began in the fall of 2015 while I was studying philosophy in Paris. After an inspiring encounter with a friend named Viktor in Zagreb, Croatia (and to whom “Letter to Zagreb” is dedicated), himself a talented musician and composer, I decided to act on the sudden urge to learn a musical instrument as soon as I returned to France. I purchased an 88-key weighted keyboard and began teaching myself to play piano in a Parisian apartment I shared with a kind French family, where my bedroom overlooked the apartment complex pictured on the album cover.

I did not anticipate any urge at any point to write original music until one year later, when I was learning Philip Glass’ “Mad Rush,” a beautiful piece for solo piano, in my apartment bedroom in Evanston, Illinois. While learning the final movement of the piece, which consists of an arpeggiated triad in the left hand and a melody played in octaves on the right, a mistake at the keyboard led to the simple melodic movement in a song I now call “Anniversary Music.”

As time progressed I became uninterested with learning, playing, and now recording on a digital keyboard triggering software pianos (though one particularly good software piano was used to record “Letter to Zagreb”). Dad invested in an upright piano as a Christmas present that winter, and it remains the primary piano I record on today. Working with microphones rather than digital samples allowed me to emphasize different mechanical sounds of the instrument, a common motif in contemporary piano music that I had sought to incorporate into my music. This also involved small preparations (an ode in part to John Cage, the first and most significant composer in my life) to soften the piano’s sounds. Aside from “Anniversary Music,” which was recorded with a friend’s upright, every acoustic piano track in Keyboard is from Dad’s piano.

Listeners familiar with the work of Nils Frahm will surely recognize the extent of his influence on my work at the piano. One of his early albums, Electric Piano (which now, due to its record label having gone defunct, is slowly disappearing from the internet), is a collection of songs played on an electric piano. Electric pianos and digital pianos are different because an electric piano still consists of hammers hitting objects to produce pitched musical notes, whereas a digital piano is a collection of samples. A regular piano hammer hits strings that reverberate; an electric piano hammer hits an object called a tine whose vibration is amplified into a bell-like tone, so the difference between these keyboards is similar to how an acoustic guitar differs from an electric guitar. Frahm’s album was the only collection of solo electric piano pieces I had ever encountered, and I immediately became fascinated by its audible qualities. Consequently, several of these pieces were recorded on a Korg SV-1, which is a digital keyboard that is frighteningly faithful at reproducing the sounds of vintage electric pianos, like Fender Rhodes and Wurlitzer keyboards.

It is also true that instrumental sounds can be modified after they have been recorded in ways that drastically change their presentation to the listener, for better or for worse. I’ve experimented with many different recording methods over some time now, including different microphone placements, EQs, compressions, and mediums of recording. One relevant example is “Cassette Tape,” which was recorded directly to a cassette by feeding the keyboard into the tape deck. These textures are good indications of the types of sound qualities I was interested in at the time, and many of them are just as important to me as the notes themselves.

Thank you for listening.

Alex Daly
November 2017