d’Eon Makes Art out of Surveillance Technologies on Music for Keyboard Vol V: “Robby”

The piano melody on d’Eon’s new tune “Region 9” is the exact kind of thing mainstream cinema uses to soundtrack Emotive Moments: liberating road trips, graduations, and father-son connections over baseball or something. Except here, it’s overlaid against a fragile, cacophonous and melodically crystalline sequence of illegally recorded phone samples in a piece that recalls the NSA in its methodology. It's a great tune from d’Eon's new album, Music for Keyboard Vol V: “Robby”, which he's given away here. Celine writes of the album: “It's inspired by, and heavily samples, a real but unattributed phone system with tens of thousands of extensions serving various functions, from conference call lines to encrypted ASCII messages, sometimes actual people on the other end of the line. I take no credit for the audio samples, and I explicitly claim no affiliation with the organization running it. All samples are used without permission, but with unspeakable gratitude and respect to the operators, particularly Robby.”