Brothers Roger and Brian Eno have had decades of collaborative experience together. Yet for all their work alongside one another, they’ve never released a project that was credited to just the two of them. That will soon change with the newly announced album Mixing Colours, due out March 20th via Deutsche Grammophon.
Mixing Colours came together over 15 years (!) as the producer-composer siblings traded material via email. Putting everything together as a record wasn’t even on their minds when they first began. “I’d wake up, go straight upstairs, put my equipment on and improvise, then I sent things to Brian that I thought he might be interested in,” Roger said in a press release. “The idea for a full album emerged as the number of pieces kept increasing and the results kept being interesting. It’s something that neither of us could have arrived at alone.”
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Each of the 18 songs on the collection save for one takes its name from a color, “comparable to those often attached to abstract paintings.” In a statement, Brian explained how the shifts in electronic composition gave the music a depth traditional instruments can’t reach:
“With classical instruments, the clarinet represents a little island of sound, the viola another, and the grand piano yet another. Each instrument is a finite set of sonic possibilities, one island in the limitless ocean of all the possible sounds that you could make. What’s happened with electronics is that all the spaces in between those islands are being explored, yielding new sounds that have never previously existed. It has been a huge pleasure for me to explore that ocean with Roger’s unique compositions.”
As a first listen to the joint effort, the Eno brothers have shared the delicate and sparse “Celeste”. Take a listen below.
Pre-orders for Mixing Colours are available now. Find the artwork and tracklist ahead.
Mixing Colours Artwork:
Mixing Colours Tracklist:
01. Spring Frost
02. Burnt Umber
03. Celeste
04. Wintergreen
05. Obsidian
06. Blonde
07. Dark Sienna
08. Verdigris
09. Snow
10. Rose Quartz
11. Quicksilver
12. Ultramarine
13. Iris
14. Cinnabar
15. Desert Sand
16. Deep Saffron
17. Cerulean Blue
18. Slow Movement – Sand