Kevin Moore
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This article is about the keyboardist and member of Dream Theater named Kevin Moore, which is also the birth name of the blues musician known better as Keb' Mo'.
Kevin Moore is a keyboardist most often identified as a founding member of the progressive metal band Dream Theater. He began his musical career with guitarist John Petrucci, bassist John Myung, drummer Mike Portnoy and singer Chris Collins in the band Majesty, which later became Dream Theater.
After eight years and three studio albums with that band, in 1994 Moore decided to leave Dream Theater to explore other musical ambitions. He had grown tired of the monotony of progressive metal and decided it was best for him to perform his own brand of music as a solo composer. He moved to Sante Fe, New Mexico and started writing material for his first album.
After writing and demoing various material, he released the album Dead Air For Radios under the name Chroma Key. His support musicians for that record were Mark Zonder of Fates Warning and Steve Tushar. The sound was a radical turn from the complex and intricate Dream Theater sound. It was a dark, ambient electronic sound which was more in line with Depeche Mode than Dream Theater.
Dream Theater fans noticed in hindsight that Moore had subtley explored this style of composition in one of Dream Theater's songs, the haunting Space-Dye Vest, and the Chroma Key song On The Page was in fact a follow-up to Space-Dye Vest.
In 2000 he moved to Los Angeles where he recorded the digitally-themed You Go Now. The line-up for that record was Moore, David Iscove on guitars and Steve Tushar on loops and programming. Upon finishing that album he moved to Costa Rica, where he worked for Radio For Peace International producing a bi-weekly activist radio program.
In 2003, Fates Warning guitarist Jim Matheos invited Moore to work with him on a new musical project involving Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy and Cynic bassist Sean Malone. It would be the first time Kevin had worked with Portnoy since he left Dream Theater nearly 10 years earlier. The band that was formed was given the name OSI, and they released the album Office Of Strategic Influence. Musically, it is best described as a mixture of Chroma Key's dark, melodic focus with the guitars and heaviness of Fates Warning and Dream Theater. Kevin assumed vocal duties for OSI after Steven Wilson dropped out of the project.
2004 saw Kevin move to Istanbul, Turkey and compose the soundtrack to the horror film Okul, which was released as the Chroma Key album Ghost Book. This experience inspired him to do something a little different for his next solo album. He scoured public domain films looking for one that exuded a certain mood, and decided to write a sort of pseudo-soundtrack to it. The film he chose was Age 13, an educational film from the 1950s originally for use in schools. He then took the existing film, slowed it to half speed, and let it dictate the moods, textures, and even running times of the songs he wrote to it. Graveyard Mountain Home is what he named the album.
External link
- Chroma Key website (http://www.chromakey.com/)
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