Igor Keller recorded four albums last spring. Not across four years. Not in rotating sessions between tours. Four complete albums, back to back, in a single season. For Longboat (a project led by Igor Keller), it’s just how the process works.
The latest output from his Longboat project, Album 35, didn’t arrive with a grand concept attached. Keller had no structural blueprint when he started writing — the three-timeline framework the record eventually settled into, moving between past, present, and future, came together on its own once the material existed. He recognized it after the fact.
Thematically, the record takes on the current news cycle — not as polemic, not as performance of civic concern, but as a songwriter drawing the same line great writers always have between what’s happening now and what’s happened before. The specific alarm changes. The human pattern doesn’t. Keller’s been making this observation long enough that it no longer requires editorializing.
The strings on Album 35 — two violin sections, viola, cello — were tracked in four-hour sessions, roughly twenty minutes per piece. Keller directs the room by giving musicians the meaning of a track before they play it. Not a technical breakdown. A few words about what the song is. The rest follows. What results in the harmonic language is something a longtime jazz background makes difficult to avoid: extensions, suspensions, chords that wouldn’t be out of place in a jazz standard dressed up as a string arrangement. Keller started as a saxophone player. That hasn’t left him.
Right now, he’s doing something that cuts against the current moment in music: going more acoustic, not less. Stripped-down keyboard accompaniment. Piano arrangements of existing songs posted publicly on TikTok. A deliberate pivot toward live performance at the exact moment AI production tools are offering artists the opposite option. The logic is simple — make the human origin of the work impossible to miss.
Igor Keller has described looking back at the Longboat catalog with genuine satisfaction and forward at what’s still coming with the same energy he started with. Not the energy of someone trying to keep up. The energy of someone who hasn’t found a reason to stop.
Thirty-five albums doesn’t look the same on everyone. On Igor Keller, it looks like curiosity with no finish line in sight.