Roger Eno & Brian Eno: Mixing Colours (2CD expanded)

Roger and Brian Eno explore the nature of sound in their first duo album, Mixing Colours. 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 pieces on a MIDI keyboard. He sent the digital MIDI files of these recordings to his older brother, who translated each piece into its own sound world, reworking and manipulating the content. The brothers' interplay unfolded as the project developed. The earliest pieces of Mixing Colours took shape around 2005, but were not originally intended as part of a larger collection. "We weren't working toward an end result - it was like the back and forth of a conversation we had for 15 years," Roger says. "After waking up in the morning, I would immediately go upstairs, turn on my equipment and improvise, then send stuff to Brian that he might be interested in. The idea for an album came about as the number of pieces grew and the results remained interesting. Neither of us could have accomplished that on our own." Mixing Colours 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 pop world has advanced the vast possibilities of electronic music to create once unimaginable timbres and instrumental timbres. Brian says, "With classical instruments, the clarinet represents one 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. In electronics, all the spaces between these islands are explored. The result is new sounds that didn't exist at all before. I had tremendous fun exploring this ocean through Roger's incomparable compositions. "With only one exception, all of the tracks on the recording have color-related titles - "Burnt Umber," "Obsidian," or "Verdigris," for example - as do many an abstract painting. Taken as a whole, they are a deep meditation on shifting shades of sound and contrasting timbres. The final track, "Slow Movement: Sand," reduces the music to the bare essentials of timbre, timbre and pulse. Mixing Colours, Roger says, stems from shared artistic, musical and literary interests, making it a work of true collaboration between the brothers. "Listening to this album a lot - especially in light of the fantastic worlds Brian has created - opens up my vast landscape. You can enter and linger."