Of Desire by Keith Kelly

Guiding Questions:
1) What do you do when you are the last person awake in your house at night?

2) What do you do when you are bouncing around in your space, looking for new frontiers, new outlets?

3) How do you make something when you are running on fumes, slowly loosing touching with the activity of the day?
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I stay up, playing around in my studio. I can't play my usual instruments, so I find myself at the keyboard, on the bass, and writing music.

I listen to music, try to dig through stacks of music and notebooks, look through scores. In an attempt to work through my own creative process, I created a series of cell-based compositions, many in reference to records I liked. Looking at harmonic, melodic, rhythmic chunks..bits of vibe or mood. I would transcribe, or look at a score, and make snippets or ribbons or whole cloth. I would improvise various "solos" over the top - editing, mixing, mashing, squishing, until I arrived at things that seemed to fit. And the build solos off of those, discarding the original shapes or contour. I would chop things up, playing the available tools, and mostly tried to make song-length pieces. Not quite through composed, but maybe.

This is late-night-at-home music.
Wound-down.
Precipice of sleep (or falling).

improvised music from the southwest