John CS Keston is an award winning transdisciplinary artist reimagining how music, video art, and computer science intersect. His work both questions and embraces his backgrounds in music technology, software development, and improvisation leading him toward unconventional compositions that convey a spirit of discovery and exploration through the use of graphic scores, chance and generative techniques, analog and digital synthesis, experimental sound design, signal processing, and acoustic piano. Performers are empowered to use their phonomnesis, or sonic imaginations, while contributing to his collaborative work. Originally from the United Kingdom, John currently resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota where he is a professor of Digital Media Arts at the University of St Thomas. He founded the sound design resource, AudioCookbook.org, where you will find articles and documentation about his projects and research.
John has spoken, performed, or exhibited original work at New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME 2022), the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC 2022), the International Digital Media Arts Conference (iDMAa 2022), International Sound in Science Technology and the Arts (ISSTA 2017-2019), Northern Spark (2011-2017), the Weisman Art Museum, the Montreal Jazz Festival, the Walker Art Center, the Minnesota Institute of Art, the Eyeo Festival, INST-INT, Echofluxx (Prague), and Moogfest. He produced and performed in the piece Instant Cinema: Teleportation Platform X, a featured project at Northern Spark 2013. He composed and performed the music for In Habit: Life in Patterns (2012) and Words to Dead Lips (2011) in collaboration with the dance company Aniccha Arts. In 2017 he was commissioned by the Walker Art Center to compose music for former Merce Cunningham dancers during the Common Time performance series. His music appears in The Jeffrey Dahmer Files (2012) and he composed the music for the short Familiar Pavement (2015). He has appeared on more than a dozen albums including two solo albums on UnearthedMusic.com.
Love it or hate, the Rhodes is here to stay. Eventually we will have the Rhodes Mark 7, maybe even this year? Perhaps, in the distant future, after the patents expire, the Rhodes mechanics will become part of the public domain, similar to the acoustic piano, and be produced by a variety of companies. There might be a nine foot grand Rhodes, a studio Rhodes, a baby Rhodes, and an upright Rhodes. This chunk of “studio” Rhodes is running through loads of processing including MDAs RezFilter, delay and who knows what else.
This year’s Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Arts starts on Tuesday, February 17 and goes through Sunday, February 22 at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Festival features dozens of accomplished artists, performers, and speakers from around the globe. The content ranges from the experimental, electronic sounds of STEIM to the glitch, minimal dub of Stefan Betke, aka Pole.
My group, Keston and Westdal featuring Graham O’Brien on drums, are appearing at the festival on Thursday, February 19, 2009 at the Bedlam Theatre. We will be performing works based on material from our 2008 collection of experimental compositions, One Day to Save All Life (Unearthed Music, 2008). The concert is free and open to the public, ages 18 and up. Here’s Upward Not Northward from our last album. You might notice an abrupt ending on this piece because it’s taken from a gapless master.
Here’s another example of Rhodes recorded during our set at Nublu. It’s interesting for me to hear these clips unprocessed and without the other instrumentation, not to mention the excessive crowd noise in the room. During the performance, when I record these clips, I’m usually running the Rhodes through various amounts of amp modeling, eq, compression, delay, and sometimes reverb or filtering. There’s often other loops playing while I record as well as live drums, bass and laptop added by Graham and Nils as you can hear in Segment of Recording from Nublu.
One of the nice things about playing at Nublu is the fact that they have a Rhodes in their backline. I don’t know very many clubs that do, and most of the time, if they do they are in disrepair. Instruments in backlines suffer a lot of abuse. The Rhodes is not a delicate instrument but with heavy use certain things break. Most commonly the tines. So I went to the club early just to check on the Rhodes and offer to repair it if needed.
In fact, two tines in the upper register were broken, but fortunately Nublu had a “parts” Rhodes in the basement that had both of the broken tines intact. I quickly replaced the tines and made a few other minor adjustments and the vintage keyboard was ready for an evening of music. Here’s a clip that I created while improvising during our second set to give you an idea what shape the Rhodes was in.
I captured the sound a very old looking group of subway cars going by at the Battery Park City, Chambers Street station. They had an aging deep red paint job and looked as though they were full of some sort of cargo as they flew past.
Love it or hate, the Rhodes is here to stay. Eventually we will have the Rhodes Mark 7, maybe even this year? Perhaps, in the distant future, after the patents expire, the Rhodes mechanics will become part of the public domain, similar to the acoustic piano, and be produced by a variety of companies. There might be a nine foot grand Rhodes, a studio Rhodes, a baby Rhodes, and an upright Rhodes. This chunk of “studio” Rhodes is running through loads of processing including MDAs RezFilter, delay and who knows what else. 
One of the nice things about playing at Nublu is the fact that they have a Rhodes in their backline. I don’t know very many clubs that do, and most of the time, if they do they are in disrepair. Instruments in backlines suffer a lot of abuse. The Rhodes is not a delicate instrument but with heavy use certain things break. Most commonly the tines. So I went to the club early just to check on the Rhodes and offer to repair it if needed.