Eli Keszler is a composer, percussionist and installation artist based in New York. His records run across PAN, Shelter Press, Empty Editions and LuckyMe, from Cold Pin and Last Signs of Speed to Icons and his 2025 self-titled album. His installations of motorised piano wire, strung through rooms and once across eight hundred feet of the Manhattan Bridge, have shown at MoMA and the V&A. He has written more than ten film scores, and played on records by Oneohtrix Point Never, Laurel Halo and Skrillex.

Over a week at The Power Station, engineered by Nolan Thies, Keszler recorded the source material for MATERIALS: cymbals and crotales, gongs, bowed and struck metal, drum skins and prepared surfaces, each held from first contact through to the last of the decay. We spoke to him at his studio to discuss his work, process and philosophy behind recording the library.

I grew up with music more or less surrounding me from a pretty young age. My father was a guitarist and he played fiddle as well, a general appreciator of music, semi-professional for a while. He would have these pretty elaborate sessions at my house when I was a kid, with his friends; they would do Irish music. He was in the Peace Corps in Brazil in the sixties and came back with a treasure trove of Brazilian music (a lot of Baden Powell and Caetano Veloso), and he played classical guitar. There were half-working instruments lying around the house that I would mess around with, and there was always a sense that I would make music one way or the other. I remember sitting in the middle of these sessions and taking everything in.

My first strong memory of any kind of musical experimentation was driving in the hills on Cape Cod with him. There were cicadas on either side of the car and we were driving fast, whipping around these hills, and you'd hear these whipping sounds. I remember commenting to my dad about it, and him saying, "Oh, there are these composers like John Cage and people like this who work with chance and recordings of natural sound", and that he would throw dice to write music. I remember being really young and being deeply confused by that.

Music was everywhere, and that's really how it came about. There were no expectations for what I'd do, but just an expectation that I'd make music.

Something happened when I was about 18 or 19, where I got completely fixated on the idea that I was going to make my own music. It was quite a painful process in a way, where I was discovering what that would mean. I more or less had to strip everything away and give up everything for a little bit to actualise it. I started to really deconstruct the drum set (which is really my musical home in a way), removing pieces of it, trying really everything you can imagine, ways to take it apart.

I'd listen back to recordings of myself playing when I'd improvise, and my feet would just be going off constantly. No matter what you do, if you have a pulsing bass drum and hi-hat, it's a drum set. And it sounded like a drum set. So the first thing I did was remove my feet. And from there I was like, OK, now it's an open landscape.

I started experimenting with putting different things on the drums. The conservatory I went to had this very generous instrument library. The guy who ran it was so liberal that he was eventually fired, because very expensive instruments were lost, but I was the beneficiary of that. I took sitars and tablas. And that's when I stumbled on the crotales, which I removed from their mounts and put on the drums, and all of a sudden a world opened up where I was playing this kind of hybrid melodic instrument. It changed the timbre and sound so much that it barely felt like a drum set.

At the same time I was taking in a lot of very abstract electronic music and imagining: how would I play with this? If someone's playing some very esoteric electronic pattern, well, what do you do? No one wants to hear, or I don't want to hear anyway, just normal banging drums that swallow the whole sonic tapestry. You want something that sits inside of it. So I had to figure out how to develop a touch on the instrument that matched that.

There were certain models, too. It was a different era, but drummers like Tony Oxley and Han Bennink, who I got to know pretty well, and Paul Lytton (a bunch of UK players), and then Paul Motian. Some of these drummers were very textural and subtle in the way they played, and blended with the ensemble. I tried to approach that in my own way, and that's how all this started.

A lot of my friends who were really trying to participate in contemporary music culture more or less abandoned their instruments. They'd be a guitarist or a saxophone player, they'd played their whole lives, they'd studied, they knew every voicing, and then when it came time to figure out how to make contemporary music, they said, "No, that's not the contemporary landscape. The contemporary landscape is laptop and electronics." They went into the box, more or less. Some people had success with that, of course, but I always thought it was a really weird missed opportunity, because they have this incredible facility with something that, at the end of the day, is timeless in a sense. Not the guitar. The guitar is not timeless, and the drum set's not timeless, it's very boxed into an era. But wood and metal and vibrating surfaces will exist for as long as earth exists. So you're working with the most fundamental elements when you learn one of these acoustic instruments.

I always felt that I wanted to figure out how to navigate the contemporary world through my instrument, and that was really the conclusion I came to. It's mainly just treating the instrument like materials. That was a big thing too: not investing so much in the instrument any more. If I stopped playing completely I'd feel a little bit of sadness, but not that much, because at the end of the day I don't really think about the instrument. That's why I've been able to do something different with it: I'm approaching it like paints. It's just a bunch of things, and I could get rid of all of them and replace them with other things and it wouldn't matter, because it's just music.

I've always admired artists that have very surprising and strange careers, that traverse worlds where the only connective tissue is really them, and I've tried to be one of those. There is a bravery that comes with that: to put yourself out there and say, I can work with people in the pop world or the film world, and I also can work with very radical, avant-garde, very out-there artists, and it's all really the same to me. I go in very open, open-hearted, and see what's there. I try not to have a hierarchy of predetermined values. To me, Jandek and Skrillex are both incredible artists: truly individualistic, once-in-a-generation, once-in-a-lifetime types of people. That's really what I look for: that purity of expression.

In all collaborations you end up getting asked to do things you would not normally do, and oftentimes those points of friction are the most interesting. They leave you with a residue when you walk away. You get asked to play in a certain way, and you say to yourself, "I don't do that." You have that voice in your head. And then you do it, and you realise you can, maybe in a different way than you'd have thought. That's when growth really occurs.

I can say safely that the reason my most recent record was so different from my previous ones is that I had done so much film music and been pushed in all these different directions. So once it came time to just, with a blank canvas, do what I want to do, it's like, well, I'm not hearing the same way any more.

I started using Sensory Percussion, which uses an electromagnetic pickup to listen to the drums and lets you program sounds against them. That opened up a lot of possibilities for solo performance, because all of a sudden I could hit a drum (not a pad, but a drum) and have any number of things happen to that sound. That coincided with the time I started working with Oneohtrix Point Never; Dan and I and his engineer developed a whole way of using these triggers to enhance the songs.

I've always worked with samples and samplers. Number one, I just love the way it sounds. There's something really beautiful about capturing something, removing its intention and placing it somewhere else. Sampling is a great misuse of technology. The recording is a recording of a thing, and then you place the beginning at the end and it does something very interesting immediately.

Frankly, when I've tried to sample my own playing, I've tried in a very conventional way and have had various amounts of success. Sometimes I'll have a bell that'll be great and I'll be able to use it for something. But as far as taking the gestural approach to the instrument and placing it in a library that's usable, that I've not had success with.

With that said, when I came upon your instruments, I noticed that your decisions were decisions I would maybe have made, which is an interesting experience that doesn't happen too often with technology companies. You hit a preset and you're like, oh, that's a beautiful orchestration. It's subtle and it sounds like an artistic gesture. It's not an expression of a technique; it's a gesture and an approach unto itself. So I truly had in my head that we would work together on something, and then you reached out to me, which is always the best way for things to happen. To me it's an exciting development that there are instruments being made with an artistic sensibility, because unfortunately the technology companies and the technology producers are often very distantly related to the people making the music.

It's just such an incredible space, and it's probably the only one of its kind left in New York in terms of the architecture. Drums and percussion are uniquely sensitive to architecture, and there's almost nothing that can articulate it better acoustically than a nice transient from a snare drum. You really hear the colour, the overtones, the resonances of the space. So I wanted to use the space, and use the size of the space, to our advantage.

My thinking was to bring in instruments that would be almost impossible to set up in sequence anywhere else. If you want a single sound, sure, it's there. But to give gestures and interpretations of the instruments in space that wouldn't be possible architecturally or technically for most people. We spent a lot of time capturing rolls and physical motions across gongs and bells that would be impossible under other circumstances, and the colours were quite remarkable in that space.

Because it's a collage engine, it offers the possibility to take fragments, musical fragments, and layer them. I started to think of them over the course of the session as tiny little miniatures: a seven-second piece of music that could then be layered and really bring about endless kinds of variability.

I often think, with percussion, of this great Morton Feldman quote that I love, where he said: "I want the ocean without the waves." Often with percussion, you want the resonance without the attack. There's a great opportunity here, especially with some of these incredible gongs, to really remove some of the attacks and end up with these beautiful, uncanny textures. I was just struck by some of the resonances. I don't think you could get them again from the instrument, and you definitely couldn't synthesise them.

I brought a huge array of sticks and mallets of all types, and we spent a lot of time combining materials together. So for instance, a metal beater with a friction mallet that's really meant to be dragged across a surface, which creates a resonance without an attack, while the metal reacts to that resonance and creates these shimmering, bright noises layered over the top, which of course then affects the resonance. You end up with this kind of almost feedback system running through the gong.

From the beginning, our conversations were about making a percussion library that hasn't really existed before: one that captures the spirit of it, where it's about the energy coming from these instruments and not simply cataloguing a series of instruments. What is a drum? It's really a skin, a tight skin. But you click on one in these libraries and it's like thunk, and you pitch-shift it, and that's it. But really this thing has got a whole edge, it's got a side, it has a bottom, it has a stick that can be dragged. There's a whole world inside of these instruments, and the magic of it is that world. It's not the instrument itself. It's not the thunk. No one cares about that, actually. That's the most primitive aspect of it. We wanted to capture and explore the whole outer world of it, to reveal the thing itself, rather than just document stuff that's already been documented.

It is really different, for sure. It took me about half a day to get acclimatised to the idea of playing, producing an idea, and then stopping immediately. Because so much of my process has been about producing an idea, ending up somewhere, keeping going, embracing certain things that happened, moulding it. I often compare the way I make music to making a ceramic, where it's spinning and you're shaping it in real time and it might get off and you drag it back in. But this approach is almost like you take a brush and thwack, and that's it. It's one shot and that's it. I found myself getting more and more into it, and by the end of the second day I was completely locked into making each single gesture full of intention.

I respond in a very pure and almost childish way to sound, where I hear a chord on a piano or a resonance and it evokes a specific feeling in me, as if I'm watching a movie and I'm affected by a character, and that character overtakes me and I try to develop it. That's really what it is: pure reactive instinct and feeling. With materials, I have a quite natural way of looking at a piece of metal and imagining what could come out of it, seeing something's potential energy.

Living with an instrument, there's no substitute for that. A lot of great drummers will work with their cymbal for their whole life, and they know each little corner, the right spot of the bell, the right stick. When those instruments get passed down, other people try to conjure that out of them and it sounds like that, but it's different. It's the years of striking something and pulling sound out of it, or muting it, and knowing what that does. There's some physical relationship that develops with instruments that's hard to talk about.

I play very, very dynamically, and often really, really quiet: shockingly quiet, especially by contemporary standards, which are excessively loud on the drums in my opinion. And that's not even a stuffy opinion: if you listen to the so-called heaviest drummers of all time, someone like John Bonham, you look at him play and he's not slamming the drums, and his sound is massive. The truth is that if you want a massive sound you don't slam the drums, because when you slam a piece of metal, a cymbal, it starts bending, and when it bends it vibrates less. The same is true with the drum. If you want a loud sound from a drum, you strike and you pull out, and when you pull out the sound comes out with it. If you play down into it, it stops it, and it stops resonating.

On my recent record I was asked over and over again (it was a joke question), "what kind of sticks do you use?", and I wish I had a snarky answer, but the truth is I use hundreds of different kinds of sticks. That's why I have two huge cases I brought with me: because I hear it, I hit it, I go, "eh, the tip's not long enough, and it needs to be wider to get the sound," and so I switch to that stick. It's a very specific tool for each instrument. Oftentimes, if it's an engineer I haven't worked with before, I say: listen, do not treat this the way you would mic a normal drummer, because it's not that thing at all. You can bring the overheads way further down. You can use an SM57 on the snare, but you also could use something more delicate, because I'm not hammering it.

Drums are great testers. They test rooms and they test effects, because they're just so dry. There's such an abundance of pitch information that you end up with noise, so you're left with the pure after-effect of those strikes. We often use very transparent reverbs, because the drums are so dry and textural: you can put quite a bit on and you don't lose that articulation, because there are so many transients. It's like a cascade of tumbling rocks, or sand. So, hard compression mixed with open reverbs, and granular resonators are very cool.

My general approach to effects is to use as little as possible. I try to imagine the beginning of the sound and the end of the sound, and how it will be perceived: what's actually being heard, not what I've produced.

I've had various moments of reflection on this. I've always felt that the more esoteric ends of music are quite beautiful, and I don't think they're only for people who study music, or for people who quote-unquote know about music. I've always been quite populist in this regard. So from my perspective, the idea of taking my techniques and my sounds and presenting them, opening them up to the masses, is a very beautiful thing. You end up with some things that you love, some things that surprise you, and some things where you go, "OK." But that's all good. If you don't want to open yourself up to risk, you don't collaborate.

Percussion is particularly allergic to being boxed into a library, because it is so materially bound. It's even harder than, say, strings, because it's so physical and there are so many big things in space. One thing we really aimed to capture were the more gestural approaches that I take: the preparation, the types of gestures, the speed of the rolls. There are libraries that of course have rolls and fast rhythms, and of course you can speed anything up. But I don't think there's been anything that's tried to approach percussion in a more granular way quite like we have.

Obviously you can take my sounds and do whatever you want with them; anyone could have done that without this library. But what would have been almost impossible would be to take these complex gestures that run across many instruments, that are dealing with space and time, and create them inside of a digital system. And I think from the outset we agreed that we wanted to capture that, and not try to make a robot version of me, which I don't think serves anyone, really.

It's not up to us whether we have to change. There are societal and technological forces that are way bigger than our narrow interests. And honestly, going back to the percussion stuff, that was really what I was thinking about when I set off on this. What does it mean to be a percussionist in a semi-dystopian world? And do I want to hang on to that? That was the question, however many years ago I started this little adventure. I still don't have the answers by any means, but I've definitely tried my best to navigate through that.

Interview by Kai Whiston
Portrait by Dan Allegretto
June 2025