My ongoing search for a stage piano to suit my somewhat unconventional desires has led me in several directions described in part one and part two of this series, but when I came across the details online about the Numa X Piano GT my head was decisively turned. I ordered the flagship stage piano from StudioLogic without even trying it back in February,...

Spoiler Alert: It’s AUM from Kymatica This summer I am performing a piece at two international conferences and streaming a pre-recorded concert at a third. The generative, audiovisual piece is titled SYNTAX and is in collaboration with Mike Hodnick (aka Kindohm). Mike and I debuted the piece in November, 2021 and when we did, we both had complex hardware...

A recent setup for John C.S. Keston with a Rhodes EP at the McGuire Theater, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis As I continue my search for the “perfect” stage piano (spoiler: there isn’t one) I have been asking myself if it is practical and/or desirable to use a VST instead of a dedicated hardware instrument. This is an approach that I have used in the...

Mothership by John C.S. Keston On Black Friday, 2021 I released a solo album of 20 tracks, all recorded as a response to the despair of isolation and the horrors of… space. Yes, they were also recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic, and although the “despair of isolation and the horrors of” the global disease were (and are) a daily realty, working...

the central planes by Bloodline November 8, 2021 marked the debut release from the trio Bloodline (Cody McKinney, Peter Hennig, and myself). The album was recorded in December, 2016 – a foreboding moment just before the was world plunged into the chaos of neo-nationalist politics. It took five years of sporadic listening, discussing, editing, mixing,...

I expect this post to have several follow ups, but since writing The Democratization of Piano? I have been digging deep in my search for a an alternative to lugging my ailing Rhodes Mark I to every gig I play. Now that COVID-19 vaccines are widely available and live music is starting to happen again, I have started performing more frequently. For...