Keyboard Fantasies at 40: two machines, 200 cassettes, one voice
Beverly Glenn-Copeland's 1986 cassette, written on a Yamaha DX7 and a Roland TR-707 in rural Ontario, gets a 40th anniversary pressing on Transgressive, with a rediscovered single attached.
BY JOLT Staff · SEP 15 2026 · 3 min readKeyboard Fantasies is 40 years old and it does not arrive like an anniversary. Transgressive puts Beverly Glenn-Copeland's 1986 cassette back out on 27 November, with a 7-inch of "Light Of The Heavens", a single that has only recently been rediscovered. Six tracks, two machines, one voice. None of it needs the framing.
Glenn-Copeland was born in Philadelphia in 1944, raised in Canada, and moved to Montreal at 16 to study classical singing at McGill. Children's music paid for the next three decades: writing for Sesame Street, acting on Mr. Dressup, composing for Shining Time Station. The records came alongside that work, a self-titled album in 1971, At Last! in 1980, Primal Prayer in 2004 under the name Phynix, the Transmissions compilation in 2020, The Ones Ahead in 2023. Earlier this year came Laughter in Summer, made with his wife and producer Elizabeth Copeland and released while he was dealing with a dementia diagnosis. He began publicly identifying as a trans man in 2002.
“Also, I was so excited to write with computers and all of the new sounds and tools it afforded me. Today, we are happy to reflect on that period of time and the profound impact that the work has now taken on, some 40 years later.”
Keyboard Fantasies was made in Huntsville, Ontario in 1986, at Audio-Logic Recording Studio, with Colleen Veitch engineering and mixing. The instruments were a Yamaha DX7 and a Roland TR-707 rhythm composer, and nothing else. Glenn-Copeland had found computers five years earlier and was waiting for them to be able to help him with music. Here they finally did, and he has said the same two machines gave him the range of an orchestra. He also had something to escape: writing for children kept him from personal statements. He pressed 200 cassettes himself, sold a handful, and moved on.
What the record does is hold one mood for just under forty minutes without breaking it. Five of the six tracks run past six minutes. The DX7 carries the harmony, the melody and the air around both, the drum machine marks time underneath, and the singing stays low and level, closer to a hymn than a hook. It is new age in the plain sense, unhurried, and Glenn-Copeland has described it as an innocence that belonged to that period of his life. The lakes and woods of Northern Ontario are supposed to be in it, and he says he can hear them. The record behaves as though he is right.
Side A sets the terms and never renegotiates them. "Ever New" opens at just over seven minutes, "Winter Astral" follows at six and a quarter, "Let Us Dance" closes the side without ever naming a tempo anyone could dance to. Side B answers with "Slow Dance", the other half of the same joke, then hands over to "Old Melody", the one track under five minutes and the closest thing here to a breather. "Sunset Village" takes the last seven and fades rather than finishes. "Light Of The Heavens" is the only genuinely new object in the package.
The afterlife is part of the record now. In 2015 a Japanese collector emailed about buying the remaining copies, and the album travelled. A remaster and reissue followed in 2017, a documentary in 2019, the public vote win at the Polaris Heritage Prize in 2020, then live performances of the whole thing for audiences who were not born when it came out. That a cassette with a 200-copy run can carry a 40th anniversary at all is the story.
It is for anyone who keeps this corner of the 80s close, the new age and ambient records made cheaply and thought about for years. It is also for the people who arrived through The Ones Ahead, through Laughter in Summer, or through his turn on the Romy Madley Croft record in 2023. Play it start to finish, at a volume that lets the room in.
The flaw is the same as the virtue. Six long tracks in one register make a sitting, not a shuffle, and there is no peak to break it up. The two machines date the record to the month it was made, which is either the point or the reason it stays on the shelf. The anniversary package itself is thin: if you own the 2017 pressing, what is new is one seven-inch of one rediscovered song. That is worth the money. It is not a new record.
Four decades on, the album outlives its 200 cassettes by a distance, and it earns the reissue rather than needing it. The voice holds, the mood holds, and the title has stopped being a wish. 4.5.
