NEWS UPDATE: 29TH APRIL 2020

Thanks to Dario, Gary, Sanne, Rory, Samantha, Richard, James, and EnoWeb's own newsbot Tom Boon in no particular order for these news items.

Who amongst us hasn't dreamed of collaborating with Brian and Roger Eno? Rattling a tambourine in an isolated part of the studio because they "don't think you're quite ready yet" for a triangle... nodding blankly as they talk about books by people you've never heard of... stifling a yawn as they embark on yet another "amusing" anecdote about their "outrageous" rockstar lifestyles and "hilarious" backstage antics...

Well, sometimes dreams really do come true, in a way. Following the recent release by Deutsche Grammophon of Mixing Colours, Roger and Brian Eno are inviting fans to submit videos of their post-lockdown world to a new website. It's an idea inspired by the films made by Brian and Peter Chilvers for four tracks – ‘Celeste’, ‘Sand’, ‘Ultramarine’ and ‘Blonde’. The Eno brothers will choose eleven videos as official accompaniment for music from the album: "We want to ask people in the next few weeks to take a single shot of a quiet scene, at home, or out the window, or in their garden. Clouds passing, rustling tree leaves, a bird nesting, people conducting activities in the house: quiet moments that we are all enjoying, together, in isolation." With lockdowns continuing across the globe, the videos have taken on a greater sense of poignancy and timeliness, and the Eno brothers now encourage us to document and appreciate our own newly confined surroundings.

Just shoot a video in landscape format and slow motion mode, with a duration of 3 to 5 minutes to match your chosen track. Upload it to YouTube, Vimeo or Instagram, then fill in the form at mixing-colours.com to submit your entry. Closing date is 29th May 2020. The aim is to find value in contemporary, more restricted landscapes, and to share these across the globe – a reminder that despite current circumstances, we share more in common with one another than ever... not least music.

MANDY, IT'S THE MEDIA

Brian wrote an article about a leaked report.

TOLD STORAGE

Brian has remixed the Headie One x Fred again.. track 'Told'

VI-DAU-OH

Two films from DAU are available to stream online if you're willing to pay over your kopeks. But we have no idea if they are likely to include Eno music.

BRAND X

One film for which Brian has definitely provided the original score is We Are As Gods, a new documentary about Stewart Brand. Alas, the cancellation of the SXSW Film Festival means that its prospects are up in the air at the moment, but you can see a clip on the film's Twitter feed.

BIT AND BOB

HELP FOR HASSELL

Fourth World musician Jon Hassell now has long-term health issues, and so a group of his friends and fans have started a GoFundMe project to support him financially. Brian is up for it – you can read a note from him on the fund page.

ROBERT FRIPP'S A BIT QUIET

Robert Fripp will be releasing a new Soundscape every Friday in a "Music for Quiet Moments" series.

NEWS UPDATE: 13TH APRIL 2020

Thanks to Martina, Dario, Rory, Elizabeth, Michael, Richard, Lucia, Randolf, Nuno, Lars, Gregory, and EnoWeb's own newsbot Tom Boon in no particular order for these news items.

Mixing Colours, the new album by Brian and Roger Eno, has been out for a few weeks – tranquil material with a deckled edge of tension that makes it admirably suited to the Zeitgeist of many people's Weltanschauung. Roger and Brian indulged in a modest amount of publicity to support the release.

Reviews

ALL TALK

RAMSBrian was also interviewed by Sissi Makropoulou for  Apartamento magazine (with a photo that inadvertently revealed shocking evidence of drug use in the Eno studio), looked to the future with Yanis Varoufakis from lockdown in Norfolk, and is/was scheduled to be a remote witenagemote keynote speaker at the 2020 International Music Summit (the main event has been postponed to 2021, but organisers still plan a 2020 virtual edition). He also spoke at an event on behalf of Julian Assange in February.

DON'T GO GETTING ANY IDEAS

The Institute of Art and Ideas has released some videos of Brian at past HowTheLightGetsIn events, where people were allowed to sit close to each other. The very idea!

RAMS TIME

RAMSGary Hustwit is making the RAMS documentary free to view until Tuesday 14th April. In addition, the RAMS soundtrack is to be released on vinyl including a download code on Record Store Day – whenever that is. Probably June 20th, but who can claim to know what the future holds? The track listing is:
A1. Bright Clouds of Metal
A2. Harmonic Guitar
A3. Unusual Temperament
A4. A Warm Sweet Bed
A5. Beautiful Metals
A6. Designer Piano
B1. Generative Lounge
B2. Design as Reduction
B3. Al’Khwarizmi Piano
B4. Shimmering Future
B5. For A New Design 

BROUGHT TO BOOK

Brian has written the foreword to Client Earth's book Guardians of the Planet: How to be an Eco-Hero.

CARTOON TIME

Stuff from YouTube.

ALL HANDS ON DEK

The forthcoming issue of DEK magazine will have a lengthy feature on David Bowie's photo shoot for 1.Outside.

WAVE HELLO

Wavepaths is looking for investment to develop its therapeutic music experiences. Brian is still listed as one of the contributors on its website. There's a new video explaining what they want to achieve, presented by Founder and CEO Mendel Kaelen, a man who blinks perhaps less often than one might expect .

STRATEGIC WITHDRAWAL

Richard Kadrey's Passive-Aggressive Oblique Strategies. 

CANNED MUSIC

While searching trhough an old CD-R yesterday, I came across an unexpectedly topical article dated August 30th 1999 by the Express' Consumer Affairs Correspondent Mark Townsend. Headed STOCK UP YOUR LARDERS NOW, it claimed "EVERY household in Britain will be urged this week to stockpile emergency food rations to last them through the millennium celebrations" because of predictions "that every grocery store in the land will close for at least two days at New Year" and the havoc due to be wrought by the Millennium Bug. Supermarket Tesco, for example, would be "stockpiling champagne and toilet rolls". I wasn't quite sure why I had kept this piece of flim-flam until I got to the penultimate paragraph.

Canned music

NEWS UPDATE: 12TH FEBRUARY 2020

Thanks to Dario, Michael, Peter, Rory, Alex, and EnoWeb's own newsbot Tom Boon in no particular order for these news items.

Brian and Roger Eno will be speaking on Michael Engelbrecht's radio programme Klanghorizonte on 15th February, albeit in separate segments. For the first time on air, they will be discussing aspects of their forthcoming album Mixing Colours. Brian will also speak about two tracks – and their context in his work – from Drums Between The Bells (with Rick Holland) and High Life (with Karl Hyde), as part of the show's third themed hour titled Das Dunkle Leuchten or Homegrown Sounds for Future Space Retreats – a mixtape of Brian’s work between 2010 and 2020.

Klanghorizonte is broadcast on the Deutschlandfunk radio station in Germany from 1:05am CET, and will thereafter be available for streaming on demand during  the following 7 days for those of us who need our beauty sleep at the actual time it goes out.

Peter Chilvers has made seven short films to accompany tracks from Mixing Colours, in some sort of collaboration with Brian. The first is available now.

Víkingur Ólafsson got a photo with Brian and Roger last November.

When You REACH KYOTO, SEND A POSTCARD IF YOU CAN

Paul Stolper Gallery is publishing a new set of postcards by Brian Eno. There are 29 litho printed cards in the collection featuring reproductions of his work, and Brian has written an introductory essay for the accompanying booklet. The postcards are presented in boxes with a choice of four colours.

  • Paul Stolper
  • 13+ minutes of offcuts, insets, noises off, and snatches of music, from a report on Light Music at Paul Stolper in 2016

MORE THAN ONE WORD

He speaks, and he is recorded.

He writes, and he is rendered in pixels.

ON THE WRITE ROED

21st February sees the release of The Book, the autobiography of musician and artist Hans-Joachim Roedelius in English-language translation. He's had a long life and strange career, of which his work with Brian is only a tiny fraction. You get a Foreword by Brian, a signed art print, and a unique telling of a life story. The book is exclusively available from Curious Music. 

MAKING TRACKS

Appearing under the names of Musiker J. Peter Schwalm and Film-maker Sophie Clements is this Schwalm-Eno track "One Side" from 2004.

STRAW IN THE WIND

Brian is apparently one of 50+ artists invited to propose artworks and projects in response to the climate emergency by Serpentine Galleries. But we don't know any more about that. It's even possible that this is just a reference to the We Make Tomorrow summit mentioned below.

 

NEWS UPDATE: 24TH JANUARY 2020

Thanks to Dario, Rory, Martina, Sanne, Richard, Mikkel, Thomas, and EnoWeb's own newsbot Tom Boon in no particular order for these news items.

Mixing ColoursMixing Colours, a new album of music by Roger Eno and Brian Eno, will be released worldwide on 20th March on the Deutsche Grammophon label. The musicians followed the same way of working as on 2002's EnoShop release, 18 Keyboard Studies by Hans Friedrich Micheelsen: Roger recorded individual pieces using a MIDI keyboard, and then sent the MIDI files to Brian to manipulate.

“We weren’t directing this towards an end result," Roger says. "It was like a back-and-forth conversation we were having over a 15-year period. 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. 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 ... The more you listen to this album, particularly with the fabulous worlds that Brian has created, you can really walk into its enormous landscape and stay.”

Brian says: “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.”

The track titles invoke colours and textures, matching the album's deep meditation on shifting tonal shades and contrasts in timbre:

  • Spring Frost
  • Burnt Umber
  • Celeste
  • Wintergreen
  • Obsidian
  • Blonde
  • Dark Sienna
  • Verdigris
  • Snow
  • Rose Quartz
  • Quicksilver
  • Ultramarine
  • Iris
  • Cinnabar
  • Desert Sand
  • Deep Saffron
  • Cerulean Blue
  • Slow Movement: Sand

The album artwork features abstract paintings by Dom Theobald, including a piece that Roger gave Brian.

Bonus points trivia: This is a homecoming of sorts for Brian: his first LP appearance was on Deutsche Grammophon as part of the anonymous chorus performing Paragraphs on Cornelius Cardew's The Great Learning in 1971.

APPEARANCES

Brian will manifest himself both physically and virtually during the coming months.

Not necessarily an appearance – the website doesn't say – but Brian has proposed a Vision Makers initiative for Campfire Convention, with the chance to share new ideas during its Winter Gathering.

ENO SELLS OUT

In November 2016, Brian Eno, Laurie Anderson and Ebe Oke met in cold, rainy Copenhagen for Dokument #2, for a week of improvisation using computers, guitars, organ, drums, violin, paper, elastic, and apparently neoprene hammers as well to round it all off. 10 hours of recordings were boiled down to 11 tracks running at just over 40 minutes, pressed on Nordsø Records in a limited edition of 500 numbered 180 gram vinyl Dokument #2 records. UK pre-orders from Rough Trade have sold out although it's possible some Rough Trade branches and shops in Denmark may still have copies.

  • Rough Trade including a short video of sound extracts
  • Artist talks: recycling our links from 2016, here are Eno, Anderson and Oke at Dokument#2, Copenhagen Library: Part 1 — Part 2 — Part 3

VOICES FROM THE PAST – 39 YEARS ON

Over on the Brian Eno Before And After Ambient Facebook Group, Thomas O'Neill wrote: "Being a major fan of Eno's recorded work as of spring 1981, I got wind that he was going to be doing a radio interview with host Lynn Samuels on WBAI, an NYC independent radio station. I managed to get the whole thing (with minor gap for reel change near the end) onto 7-1⁄2 ips IPS reel to reel tapes (!). I haven't re-listened to them in decades. I have to pull my old Revox out of the closet, bake the tapes, and transfer them to digital ... I'm pretty sure I have the only existing copy of this interview. Now you have it too, digitized and cleaned up. It's a snapshot of where Eno was at around the time after Remain In Light and My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. Later in the program he indicates he had started work on what would eventually be released as On Land. Note: At an hour and 38 minutes in, there is a short gap. It was at this point that the tape ran out and I had to switch to another reel. At the end of the interview, Lynn Samuels played a record that had just arrived at the station, she opened it up for the first time and played it. Laurie Anderson's 7" single on 110 Records, Walk The Dog / Oh Superman. This may have been the first time it was played on any radio station."

MISCELLANEOUS LINKS

The Gift's Instagram account posted "a recording of one of the most beautiful memories in our life" in Brian's studio, Tony Visconti talked about Subterraneans, and Faber will republish Michael Bracewell's book Remake/Remodel.

 

Other news sources

 

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