Over the course of his quarter-century career, composer Kevin Keller has been known to switch things up from album to album, but this year he took things a step further. In order to challenge himself and bring fresh ideas to his music, he used social media to crowdsource an entire album in 28 days. "I started with no narrative concept, no title, no idea really of what this music would be," Keller explains. Breaking the patterns of his previous twelve albums, he asked his fans for directions and ideas, and then designed new sounds to guide his studio improvisations. The result of this experiment is Shimmer, his first album to be released on both CD and vinyl. 

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Shimmer contains some of Keller’s most propulsive tracks, bubbling with analog beats while also deploying a multitude of motifs that mesh like clockwork. The opening “Orchards” demonstrates this style immediately with a piano intro that could be Steve Reich remixed for the dance floor. In contrast, “Bridges” recalls the timeless sound of Cluster. The more meditative moments, such as “Ithaca”, “Inverness”, and the closing “Delta,” show off his compositional knack for beautiful melodies and lush textures. The title track and its sister track “Riverbend” combine all of these streams and, like all Keller’s music, evolve their sound, never standing still even when they seem to float weightlessly.