about the record

Multi-instrumentalist producer and songwriter Barney Keen makes music for the long drive and nature’s embrace. Influenced by Brazilian MPB, experimental electronic music, folk, soul, and other rhythms, he blends the organic with truthful expression—an approach that can be traced back to his youth in the rural southwest of England, surrounded by a musical family.

“There are scenes of natural places stored permanently in my mind that inform the mood of the music I make. Open spaces, distant horizons, woodlands and big skies. Being out of that environment for most of my life now, I find I can conjure up the feeling of it through music.”

His 10-track debut album Harbinger shifts both sonically and thematically between blissful imagination and revelations of the day-to-day, and the sharper realities of adulthood. Although pooled together from many different stages of his life, the songs feel energetically bound, slowly transformed from a makeshift sonic diary of loose memos into ornate arrangements over the course of several years.

Barney describes the mission statement as “only that of living and trying to be truthful with the expression.”