While the music industry spends its energy debating what artificial intelligence means for creative work, the Seattle-based composer behind Longboat, Igor Keller, has a different answer: he’s been taking his entire discography to the piano and playing it live for pub crowds in London. The response, he says, has been overwhelmingly positive — not because the performances are flawless, but because they sound like him. That’s the distinction he draws. AI can produce sound. It cannot produce a perspective.
That ethos runs directly into Album 35, Longboat’s latest full-length, released April 17 — the thirty-fifth studio record under the moniker since 2011. Its three-part framework — organizing across past, present, and future — wasn’t mapped before a single note was written. It emerged after the fact, once the writing and arranging were done and Keller looked at what he had. The structure found him.
That kind of organic coherence has become something of a Longboat signature. Keller writes without the guardrails of genre expectation or commercial pressure, and the creative range that opens up is genuinely wide. He’s said he avoids love songs entirely — not out of rigidity, but because he has no original insight there. The subjects he does reach for — wealth, power, technology, political consequence, cultural erosion — give him room to keep moving, and Album 35 continues that pattern with the current news cycle as its backdrop, mapped against historical precedent.
Sonically, the record marks one of Longboat’s recurring orchestral releases. Every seventh album incorporates live strings, a self-imposed rule that has grown considerably in scope — from an original quartet to a full ensemble of symphony and ballet musicians. Here, that means violinists Stephen Bryant, Adrianna Hulscher, Tom Dziekonski, and Eugene Bazhanov, violists Sue Jane Bryant and Gerald Liu, and cellists Virginia Dziekonski and Walter Gray. The players receive context on each track’s intent before recording, making the sessions less about execution and more about interpretation. Backing vocals come from Ryan Leyva and Will Moore. The album was tracked and mixed at Studio Litho by Floyd Reitsma and mastered by Ed Brooks at Resonant Mastering — with Keller handling writing, arranging, conducting, and production throughout.
Album 35 was conceived as a palate cleanser after three consecutive records built around heavy subject matter — loss, mortality, and the kind of thematic weight Keller rarely steps back from. It ended up being something harder to categorize, which, for Longboat, is probably right where it belongs.
