MODERN FILMS is proud to announce the UK and Ireland theatrical film release of KEYBOARD FANTASIES, a new documentary by filmmaker Posy Dixon and producer Liv Proctor, which will screen in cinemas from 12 November 2021. Alongside the screening we're very pleased to present a conversation between the film's director, Posy Dixon and writer, John Dunning.

As a sci-fi obsessed woman living in near isolation, Beverly Glenn-Copeland (b.1944) wrote and self-released the album Keyboard Fantasies in Huntsville, Ontario back in 1986. Recorded in an Atari-powered home-studio, the cassette featured seven tracks of a curious folk-electronica hybrid, a sound realised far before its time.

Three decades on, the musician - now Glenn Copeland - began to receive emails from people across the world, thanking him for the music they’d recently discovered. Courtesy of a rare-record collector in Japan, a reissue of Keyboard Fantasies and subsequent plays by Four Tet, Caribou and more, the music had finally found its audience two generations down the line.

This new, full-length feature version of Keyboard Fantasies, featuring extended footage of Copeland’s live performances, tells the time-travelling tale of this mystical musician and vocalist, as the present finally catches up with him and he embarks on his first international tour at the age of 74. Capturing five decades of relentless musical output and shifting manifestations of gender and sexual identity, set against a backdrop of profound social change, the film celebrates the unpredictable rhythms of life.

Residing in virtual obscurity for almost half a century, Copeland has in recent years garnered a following amongst music obsessives across the world. Now counting Robyn, Blood Orange, Caribou, The XX, Four Tet and Courtney Barnet amongst his vocal fans, the cult artist’s work has gathered momentum and recognition, including signing to major indie label Transgressive Records.

Following the-release of the legendary record Keyboard Fantasies in early 2021 on its 35th anniversary, this winter (17 December 2021) also sees the release by Transgressive of Keyboard Fantasies Reimagined, a compilation album of Copeland’s songs, re-worked and re-imagined by the a collection of musical kindred spirits, including Bon Iver, Julia Holter, Blood Orange and others.

Glenn-Copeland is also the subject of contemporary artist Wu Tsang’s site-specific ‘film portrait’, Anthem (2021), created for the Guggenheim Museum in New York, which exhibited in Summer 2021. Harnessing the Guggenheim’s cathedral-like acoustics to construct a ‘sonic sculptural space’, the installation featured an immense, eighty-four-foot curtain sculpture

suspended from the oculus, onto which Tsang’s audio-visual portrait of Glenn-Copeland, improvising and singing passages of his music, was projected. The work has now been reconfigured for Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi inBerlin, where it is on display until 31 October 2021, entitled ‘Lovesong’.