"Minutiae" to be released November 2023
My new album “Minutiae” will be released to digital streaming platforms on 1st November followed by a launch show in Melbourne.
“Recorded in two distinct halves, Minutiae began in a converted country hall near the regional centre of Bendigo, Victoria. Keese set up there in 2018, improvising and recording the album’s first four tracks in as many days.
Despite the immediate fruitfulness of that session, he put aside the recordings until after the seismic shifts of the arrival of his daughter Louella in late 2019, the onset of the Covid 19 pandemic and Melbourne’s multiple lockdowns.
After moving to a new house with his family in 2021, Keese was able to acquire his own piano for the first time in two decades, resuming work on Minutiae in early 2022.
In that respect, the album offers a tandem time capsule of life both before and after parenthood, the pandemic and other profound life events. It also means that the piano we hear on the first four tracks isn’t the same as the one we hear on the last four tracks.
Quietly embellishing thoughtful piano notes with a Juno Alpha synth and various digital effects and software instruments, Keese heightens the understated majesty of all those combined elements.
Yet despite Keese’s deep fascination with repetition and minimalism – influenced by everyone from Nils Frahm and Brian Eno to Bing & Ruth and Ólafur Arnalds – there is a notable degree of variety across these compositions.
“As I got deeper into Minutiae, it became a studied act of intention,” says Keese. “Halfway through, I realised that I wanted to make an ambient instrumental album that would stand alongside [the above] artists.”
Minutiae puts him well on that path. And it’s soon to be followed with a third instrumental album, Intersections, which reverses the piano-first, synth-later approach by layering piano on top of completed electronic compositions.
In that regard, Minutiae represents not a grand reset, but another entrancing facet in the work of a craftsman who continues to explore.”