Roger Eno & Brian Eno: Mixing Colours (2LP)

Roger and Brian Eno explore the nature of sound in their first duo album, Mixing Colors. Their debut on Deutsche Grammophon, released internationally on March 20, 2020, is a milestone in their ongoing creative collaboration. 18 soundscapes invite the listener to immerse themselves in their infinite space. Mixing Colours was created over many years, with both artists drawing on their long experience as composers, performers and producers. The creative process began with Roger Eno playing and recording individual tracks on a MIDI keyboard. He sent the digital MIDI files of these recordings to his older brother, who translated each piece into his own sound world, reworking and manipulating the content. The interplay between the brothers unfolded as the project developed. The earliest pieces of Mixing Colours began to take shape around 2005, but were not originally intended to be part of a larger collection. "We weren't working towards an end result - it was like the back and forth of a conversation we'd been having for 15 years," says Roger. "As soon as I woke up in the morning, I'd go upstairs, turn on my devices and improvise, then send stuff to Brian that he might be interested in. The idea for an album came about as the number of tracks grew and the results remained interesting. Neither of us could have achieved this on our own." Mixing Colors builds bridges between the past and the future of music. Roger's compositions evoke the wistful melodicism of late Schubert, while Brian's sound design is indebted to his conceptual work with electronic music and his lifelong enthusiasm for the creative potential of new media. In his view, over the last 50 years the world of pop has developed the enormous possibilities of electronic music to create once unimaginable timbres and instrumental timbres. Brian says: "With classical instruments, the clarinet represents a small island of sound, the viola another and the grand piano yet another. Each instrument represents a limited set of sonic possibilities, a single island in the limitless ocean of all possible sounds that can be produced. With electronics, all the spaces between these islands are explored. The result is new sounds that didn't exist before. I had a lot of fun exploring this ocean through Roger's incomparable compositions. "All but one of the tracks on the recording have color-related titles - "Burnt Umber", "Obsidian" or "Verdigris", for example - as do some abstract paintings. As a whole, they are a deep meditation on changing shades of sound and contrasting timbres. The last track, "Slow Movement: Sand", reduces the music to the bare essentials of timbre, timbre and pulse. Mixing Colours, says Roger, stems from shared artistic, musical and literary interests and has become a work of true collaboration between the brothers. "If you listen to this album a lot - especially in terms of the fantastic worlds that Brian has created - it opens up a vast landscape. You can enter and linger."