Paul Arámbula and the Keeps: Still’s Keep release party

In January 2014, on a holiday visit to his hometown of Phoenix after living for a year in Berlin, Paul Arámbula picked up a Yamaha Portasound PSS-360 from a yard sale—an admittedly impractical purchase, but he crammed it in his luggage to cross the Atlantic. By March he was playing solo shows with it, taking cues from The Space Lady’s one-woman keyboard psychedelia. Arámbula began experimenting with sustained, estranged notes, submerging into the lowest depths of the keyboard’s range, where the sounds seemed more like pure vibrations than harmonic tones. He began recording his sonic experiments, laying down improvisational bass lines and adding layers of keys over the top, cutting out the garbled sections and sealing up the gaps with new material, feeling his way to a finished product. But every time he tried to impose patterns, the music would sound too structured; he could never unhear the serendipitous accidents of his original bass lines. Eventually, he came to embrace the spontaneity of his sound, drawing inspiration from the solo recordings of former Soft Machine drummer Robert Wyatt. But he knows it can be hard to kindle spontaneity in solitude. As Arámbula celebrates the release of his fourth album, Still’s Keep (Gilgongo, 2024), he brings several of his longest-held collaborators to Blank Forms to form his band: Paul Arámbula and the Keeps.

LPs of Still’s Keep will be available for early-bird purchase at Arámbula’s Blank Forms performance. The record was mixed and mastered by John Dieterich. The Keeps are Mimi Howard on bass, Michael Mandeville on keys, Jorge García on guitar/keys, Alec Recinos on guitar/keys, and Aaron Neber (Our Neighbor) on cello/guitar/keys.

Born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, Paul Arámbula spent his adolescence playing in and around the Southwest DIY scene. At the age of twenty, Arámbula moved to Berlin, where he started playing scratchy, improvised guitar sets under his own name. A few years later, having exhausted the possibilities of a dry acoustic guitar with all its strings tuned to E, he turned to layered keyboard soundscapes and ballads, which he continues to write and play in his new home base of New York. Still’s Keep is his fourth album, following Towantowanto (Musikií, 2021), The Grass Got In (self-released, 2020), and A Bit of Both (self-released, 2017). Beyond his solo work, Arámbula has also played in O de V, with Howard, Mandeville, and Recinos; the Chandails, with García, Julio Flores, and Noé García de Loera; and Vegetable, with Melissa Marriott and Anno.