A Pioneer of Electronic Music Reanimates Old Songs

"Sometime in the mid-two-thousands, when people would still hand you cassette tapes or CDs at shows or in record stores or during hangouts in someone's parents' basement or smoke-filled apartment, I was passed a dubbed copy of Beverly Glenn-Copeland's 1986 album"Keyboard Fantasies." It was a blank cassette in a clear case with the words "KEYBOARD FANTASY" scrawled across the front, the slight misspelling seemingly due to the fact that whoever wrote it ran out of space."

""Keyboard Fantasies" was a self-released project, made with only two instruments-a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer and a Roland TR-707 drum machine-but it sounded expansive: stabs of synth blending with high-pitched drones of flute, winding and bending electronic notes. Copeland was inspired by sounds from the natural surroundings near his home at the time, in Huntsville, Ontario-rushing water, wind cutting through trees. His father was a pianist, and Copeland, now eighty-two, trained as a classical vocalist from the age of fifteen."

Beverly Glenn-Copeland recorded a new album with his partner Elizabeth amid financial hardship and mounting illness. In the mid-2000s, a dubbed cassette of his 1986 self-released Keyboard Fantasies circulated, labeled "KEYBOARD FANTASY" on a clear case. Keyboard Fantasies was made using a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer and a Roland TR-707 drum machine and blended synth stabs with flute-like drones and electronic textures inspired by natural sounds near Huntsville, Ontario. Copeland trained as a classical vocalist from age fifteen, grew up with a pianist father, and previously released two folk albums and worked on a Canadian children's show. A Japanese collector, Ryota Masuko, helped revive Copeland's reputation in the 2010s, positioning him as an overlooked synth pioneer.

Read at The New Yorker