The music of Keith Handy is VERY COMPLEX

This is just something I thought to do a mini-rant on after a short phone call with my friend Paul Gaspar, a phenomenal trumpet player who has always been impressed by the obscure details that I sometimes wedge into the corners of my music.

He mentioned that musicians have a tendency to do things that will only impress other musicians. And that's probably true. But this doesn't mean that has to be in conflict with making pieces of art or entertainment that speak to people on a more direct level overall.

There are some times, for example, when I know instinctively and instantly, without thinking hard about it, that I want a run of weird-sounding sixteenth notes in a certain part -- I don't necessarily want them to sound normal or even tuneful. The actual pitches of the notes may as well be arbitrary because I'm going for a shake-the-snowglobe-up effect at that particular moment, to make the "release" right after it all the more satisfying.

So I could just, literally, choose the notes at random. But my little game that I play with myself, for my own amusement only, when holes like these arise to fill, is to somehow derive the pitches from some kind of pattern, or from a theme found elsewhere in the song (or related collection of songs). I don't intend for the listener to recognize it, or analyze it and figure it out like some kind of puzzle. To me, that would be sick, because it would require exponentially more effort than actually coming up with it.

No, the end aim in those cases is usually just to have a bunch of weird sounding notes there. And occasionally using systems or derivations will give music a different emotional "fingerprint" than either doing something by ear or totally randomly. But what I do with background detail is meant to be just that: background detail. The songs themselves are still simple, and I go out of my way to make sure the "in your face" part of the song is still in your face.