ARTISTIC BROTHERHOOD

Berlin, 19 March 2020: Two of today’s most original creative artists, Roger and Brian Eno, have joined forces to make their first ever duo album. Set for international release tomorrow, 20 March 2020, in digital, vinyl and digipack formats, Mixing Colours explores the nature of sound, its colours and textures, and the infinite variety of moods they inspire. Tonight, fans will be able to listen to the album in full, watch a brand-new video for one of the tracks and join in the online chat about the release, all as part of a special Midnight Session hosted by Deutsche Grammophon on YouTube and Facebook at 12am (CET).

The Eno brothers’ DG debut recording represents a major landmark in a collaboration that began in the early 1980s and draws on their broad and deep individual experiences as composers, performers and producers.

Mixing Colours evolved from individual pieces that Roger composed in around 2005. He began sending them to Brian as MIDI files, like aural snapshots of his work at the time. His older brother responded by manipulating their contents and matching their moods to particular sounds. The exchange of ideas gradually gathered momentum until it developed into an album-length project.

“We weren’t directing this towards an end result – it was like a back-and-forth conversation we were having over a 15-year period,” recalls Roger. “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 titles of all but one of the finished project’s eighteen tracks are associated with colours, from “Celeste” to “Desert Sand”, “Obsidian” to “Cerulean Blue”, individually simple yet collectively evocative of complex emotions and feelings.

The album’s haunting soundworld is complemented by its artwork images, chosen from the abstract paintings of Dom Theobald. Its contents are also enhanced by an accompanying series of short films, made by Brian Eno in partnership with musician and software designer Peter Chilvers. The first Mixing Colours video, for “Celeste”, was released by the Yellow Label on 7 February, with the films for “Blonde” and “Slow Movement: Sand” appearing on 14 February and 13 March respectively. Other titles are set to appear on multiple digital platforms in coming months.

Mixing Colours stands for the power of creative collaboration. Roger and Brian Eno first worked together in company with producer, musician and songwriter Daniel Lanois on the soundtrack to Al Reinert’s documentary feature about NASA’s Apollo programme, For All Mankind (1983). The brothers have since worked in tandem on soundtracks to everything from David Lynch’s Dune (1984) and Dario Argento’s Opera (1987) to Henrique Goldman’s O Nome da Morte (2017).

Brian and Peter Chilvers have worked together for many years, notably on interactive apps such as Bloom, Scape, Trope and, most recently, Bloom: 10 Worlds. Their films for Mixing Colours distil the album’s essence, marrying the simplicity and meditative qualities of its soundscapes with suitably uncomplicated, mesmerising imagery of slowly-changing, dreamlike panoramas.