It’s not always what we say, sometimes it’s more about what we leave out; the silence in between our words can speak volumes. The same can be said of music, particularly the music of Roger Eno who has recently released a companion piece of sorts to his last release titled, The skies, they shift like chords (2023). This newest album is an extension to some of those musical thoughts and is named the skies: rarities. This release also continues his relationship with the Deutsche Grammophon label.
Eno has a long history of creating music, he’s released a number of solo albums, but has also composed for film and other media outlets. Of course, he’s also worked with his brother Brian Eno for many years, beginning with 1983’s Apollo which also featured Daniel Lanois.
As you’ll hear Eno explain, his recent exploration is a sort of artistic pattern of his that more musicians might consider trying out. Instead of releasing an album and moving onto the next idea, Roger continues to find ways in which each of his albums might be expanded, either built upon or deconstructed. In this conversation, Eno shares his process which gives us the opportunity to see the skies - musical and otherwise - from Roger’s vantage point.
Roger’s music might be considered very “serious” to many folks, but - as you’ll find - in our chat, we have a lot of fun.
Evan Z. Toth: The newest album which-- thank you for sharing with me.
Roger Eno: Oh, right.
ezt: Yes. I appreciate it very much. It's a companion piece to The Skies, they shift like chords… which by--
RE: It is.
ezt: the way, I love.
RE: Thank you.
ezt: I love that album title as a musician and I understand what you mean by that sentence. Sometimes you do look up to the sky and they're somehow changing, right? Maybe the place to start here is how did this come out from the other album. How did you get to the second companion piece almost really?
re: Well, I think I might be coming out with a third. What I like doing is I don't like quick edits for a start. Maybe that's a good starting point. The longer a piece can be with little changes, almost the happier I am. Now, you've got to be careful here because you can go too easily into the ambient or new-age world, both of which I try to avoid to a degree. It's not an easy task. The idea of carrying a mood or a spirit over a number of albums, I think it's quite a good place to begin. You kind of put people-- well, they kind of know where they're going to be. It can be a red flag as well. [laughs]
ezt: There's a familiarity that people appreciate, too. Especially with this music and even though you just said it's sort of not ambient, but it certainly creates a mood.
re: Oh, definitely, definitely.
ezt: People want that. If they like it, they want more of it.
re: Sure, sure. I was just admiring your record collection. That's very impressive.
ezt: Thank you. What do you have on those shelves back there? You've got quite a collection over there also. I can't quite make out what it is.
re: This is my bits and pieces shelves. I'm in my studio and I fill it up with knick-knacks that I've found to instruments that I use.
ezt: Nice. Books, of course.
re: That's right. The stacks of that. It's like the library of Alexandria, books just falling down. I've got my writing desk up there. It's a deliberate mess. I quite like things that aren't perfect. [laughs]
ezt: We’ve got a battle of the shelves here.
re: There you go. Yes. I like the idea of a continuance. I'm a very fortunate position that as you know, I'm now with Deutsche Grammophon which are a really great record label. They treat me so well. I record in Berlin and they put me in-- it is without a joke, it's the best hotel I've ever stayed in. Not in terms of flashiness, but there are all young people, multinational people working getting on great.
The food is fantastic, the beer is wonderful. Christian Badzura who's the head of A&R in Deutsche and he's my producer as well. We get on really well. We're friends now. The whole working experience is an utter joy. They also give me, if I want, 20 excellent string players and I mean like Berlin Philharmonic level. They're terrific.
They can sightread like they know the thing and they get right into the spirit of the piece. They're wonderful people. Knowing this, I thought, "Right. I'm going to keep in that area, using that similar kind of palette." I intend to use probably myself playing strat. I really like the Strat whammy bar. You play guitar, right?
ezt: Correct. Yes.
re: That's just… What a beautiful emotive sound that is. There'll be some additions to this palette, but overall I want to keep in the same color area that I've been in the last two. Yes, that's how the second one came out. I liked where the first one appeared from. I didn't want to emulate, but I want to continue in that kind of mold. The third one is a similar mold. I did try and do some different things, but to me they just looked like rubbish. I figure, well, I know what my area is.
ezt: I'm glad you bring up the record label. It is exciting to see you on Deutsche Grammophon. When you see that logo and it has such a weight to it. I have, of course, several of those records in my collection. I love classical records and I know the yin and yang of loving the sound on those discs.
Also, being frustrated by the surface noise that creeps into quieter passages. Do you think about that kind of dichotomy of your music? This particular record sounds great. I listen to it a lot and it's fun to play on a loop. It's just one of these things.
re: Yes, good, good.
ezt: This one sounds very good, but it is tricky because your music has some quieter passages. How do you grapple with that or do you think about that or do you prefer digitally? Where are you at with that?
re: I went purely digital when that came out. I thought this was terrific. Just if for nothing else, for the room that it saves. [laughs]
ezt: Right. Sure. Convenient.
re: hat's the thing, wasn't it? I hope now that people that are still listening to vinyl. I think that they'll be listening to it in a slightly different way than they were before CDs came into existence. In fact thinking about it, it's almost impossible not to because with the CD and DAT recorders which you might just remember.
ezt: Sure.
re: What's the other one? Minidisk. Any of these digital mediums are faultless, so sonically faultless. You don't get any noise on them. When you go back to vinyl, I think your approach to it is one, you try and get the best equipment that you can afford, which used to be not the case. You just get something that played a record because that was what the standard was.
Whereas now, I think people that are into vinyl are taking it like people that are into vintage cars or something like this. It's part of the experience that you listen to it on the best set or whatever it is. I've got a friend that deals in high-end audio. The amps that he sells cost about £20,000.
ezt: Sure.
re: It's that sort of madness, you've got money, you'll just go. That admittedly is not most of
the people I know. They couldn't afford that. You tend to go-- you'd be careful about getting the correct styluses and what have you. Whatever the best style. This kind of thing. It doesn't concern me too much because those that have decided to go down a vinyl route are either like the crackles or they've done their very best to get rid of them. Well, either way. Why they don't just buy CDs, I don't know. Maybe they like the artwork. I do because my daughter does my artwork so that'll be an excuse to get an album.
ezt: Some tracks to me feel very large, very deep, and some tracks feel very intimate. I just wonder how you balance those two presentations on one record?
re: Sure. I take a lot of time because I come from the original vinyl school if you like where running order was absolutely critical. It's like varnishing a violin. For me, it has such important part in the piece. That's how I get away with it. I spend a lot of concentration on what follows what, what precedes what. There's a hell of a lot of time spent getting it in the right running order. As a consequence of that, you can have a very dense piece. Say for example, I think “Illusion” is one. Is that on that record or the one previous?
ezt: Good thing I have it here on vinyl and I can read it.
re: Isn't it?
ezt: I think it's on the previous record. It's not here.
re: Okay. Oh, I'll tell you what. There is a very dense one there, isn't there? There's a vocal.
ezt: “Patterned Ground”. Yes?
re: There you go. You would've thought that would have stuck out like a sore thumb because it's vocal. I don't think there's any other vocals on there. Put in the right spot, it can actually impact the next thing. For example, if the next thing is like two violas, which I like using, just a very skeletal piece. You've got this fabulous contrast between them.
It mustn't sound like an accident. If you concentrate on these things, it won't because you're not only putting two pieces in order, you are then affecting the one preceding those two and the one afterwards. You've then got a block of four that are unified. Do you understand?
ezt: Sure. Yes.
re: That's how I've given my secrets away. That's how I do. Also, key relationships play a lot in it as well. If you can get things that are basically in a related key because the ear then enters that other piece more elegantly.
ezt: Again, I understand what you're saying. It ties into the whole feeling of the record. In particular, I was impressed with the-- I want to use the word tension in “Changing Light”. You're sort of playing with the listener and you have these shifting dyads there. Sometimes they're coming when you think they're coming and then you are kind of surprised. It kind of throws you off, but it's a lot of fun and it creates something interesting, a little mystery, a little anxiety…
re: True.
ezt: I wonder if you'd talk about that a little bit. It was fun.
re: Well, you really get it. What good ears do you have? Grandmother, what good ears you have!
ezt: Cheers.
re: You've got it in one because what we are talking about often, I think it's visual terms a lot. I'll think of shades, and colors, and depth, atmospheres, perspectives, things like this. When you are talking now about hesitancy, leaving people to guess where it's going to come. As soon as it's got predictable, it has a huge effect just by moving it like a couple of beats.
You see you have to do hardly anything to completely alter review, which I find intriguing. In
poetic terms, it could be altering a rhyme structurally at an important time to accentuate a word or to throw another word into ambiguity. It's using these rather subtle techniques to, I think the term might be (bleep) with people's heads.
ezt: [laughs] That's the technical term. I think that's in the Oxford Dictionary of Music, I think that phrase is in.
re: Absolutely right. [laughs] I entered it myself.
ezt: That's right. Well, it's interesting too that it's almost a rock and roll punk rock thing to do, but at the same time, it's a thing you wouldn't be able to get away with in a pop song. You wouldn't really be able to shift that drive maybe in some dance music or something like that. You could turn the beat around or change things up and mess up your dance moves.
re: Well, Evan, I'll tell you who does this a lot, and it's so obvious, you'd have probably overlooked it, which is a lot of the minimalists like Steve Reich's Drumming. It's constantly putting throwing these cross-rhythms in that mutate the whole piece, continually mutates it. Although he's much more, I think, eggheaded about it, I don't know the man, I don't know how he thinks, but it seems like he's much more serious.[laughter]
ezt: Right. I've never spoken to him about it either, but okay, sure.
re: Throw it in if you ever do.
ezt: I will. I will. I'm very interested, you've described in your creative processes “decomposing” in the past and improvising and then stripping away some of the excess. Which for those of us that write words also, sometimes you just throw everything on a page and then you kill the things that you thought were so beautiful and just get rid of it and get to the point. Could you walk us through the process of how that really happens and were there moments that were unexpected where you-- do you grapple with that? It's hard to get rid of stuff.
re: Not for me it isn't because I write so much (bleep)!
ezt: [laughter]
re: No, that's not entirely true. A lot of it is from-- the program that I use is Logic, but most of them are quite similar. All of them are capable of this. I get up-- often, I start working about 6:00 in the morning because I really like that time of the day. It's like the world hasn't woken up yet. More important is that the editor inside you, they haven't woken up either. The player in you has, but the editor is still well asleep. I'll come and I'll improvise straight into Logic. Then after a couple of hours, perhaps after I've gone out walking with Ted, our dog, and my wife or something like this.
I'll come back and then it's the editor's turn. You can then clearly see, well, that's too much there. You start to pull these out. In Logic, it would be simply erasing or moving notes. Generally speaking, it's erasing because I'm pretty good at getting the right notes first time, but often I'll put in too many. It's like making a melodic line. Just by the fact that it's a melodic line is too cliched. You've got to break it up or somehow use subterfuge to get away from the obvious quality of that.
A lot of what I like doing is leaving music in a ambiguous state for the listener to do the final writing in their own minds, in their mind's ear, as it were. Hence in, I think it's on The Skies, they shift like chords… There's one that's got lots-- it's called “Mind the Gap”, actually. It's got lots of big gaps where there is silence, which unless you are a real John Cage nut and you got “4:33” on loop, you rarely find large gaps of complete silence in music. This is doing that. I like to think that during those spaces, the listener is continuing to write his own or her own melody or their own or whatever they are.
ezt: Well, it's interesting because sometimes we have these illusions with vision. If you look at something bright too long and then you move to look at something else, you can still see that thing, but sometimes that happens with music. I'm always interested. Sometimes if you've ever seen people-- you might watch a video of something happening and there's no audio to it, but your brain is sort of feel-- if it's a piano falling off of a roof of a house, your brain is going-- you're watching it and going…there’s some kind of sound there. Even though there's no sound, you do fill it in. It's interesting.
re: That's a great thing, the brain, isn't it? [laughs]
ezt: Good thing we have them.
re: I'm enjoying mine.
ezt: Good. We're enjoying yours too because we're listening to the music that your brain is making. Back to “Patterned Ground”, that is, of course, as you mentioned before, one of the only vocal songs on the album. Talk about their wordless contributions, of course. There are no lyrics to get in the way. How do you use voices as instruments? How did you approach that song either in planning, in writing, and, of course, in the production? How did you weave it in with the other elements of the track?
re: There were three stages to that. The first one came out by one of the improvisations I was talking about on a keyboard. Then I thought, "This has made a really good vocal piece." Deutsche, when it is up to recording The Skies time, they got a choir of-- I think it might have been an eight-part mixed choir, male and female. We tried this out and partly because it was wordless and partly because it didn't fit.
Going back to my running order technique, it didn't seem to fit with the rest. We felt we had to shelve it, which happens a lot. You write loads of music and it just doesn't fit there. Keep it to something else or ditch it entirely. We kept this for rarities, so you now have a wordless choir, which you don't want to sound like someone like Eric Whitacre, who's a-- I don't know if you know his work.
ezt: No, I don't.
re: I didn't until Christian Badzura mentioned him. I listened to some. He's like a modern choral writer. It was going into that territory that he was already exploring.
ezt: I see.
re: We had to do something else with it. I left it and I said to Christian, or it was agreed that he could do whatever he wanted on the production side because I'd done my bit with the writing of it as it were. I wanted a similar effect to what my brother and I found in Mixing Colors, which was that I did all the musical side, and he did all the-- which is Brian's expertise, really is the effects and the studio work.
I gave that duty to Christian who came up with something much, much bigger than we'd first had. What turned from quite a polite choral piece is now something quite powerful, isn't it? I don't know if you can remember it offhand.
ezt: Sure, yes. I listened to it just recently. Just last night, I was listening to it again.
re: It's into somewhere where it's really now quite heavily affected, which I'm glad that Chris took it there because I wouldn't have done that myself. I'd have tended to be a little more conservative about it, I think.
ezt: On “Above and Below”, I guess I was lulled into a certain mood. Then you have-- I believe that's the first time on the record that electronic keyboards, you had some digital keyboards come in there. It definitely caught my attention. I know we were talking about CDs and vinyl, but when you're recording, how do you decide when you want to use something digital and when to keep things a little more organic? Do you know what I'm saying?
re: I do, exactly. It's a really tricky question. That piece was a commission. A company commissioned me to write it, which I did in about seven hours in my studio. This is using everything sampled and that version was a complete version. That was the one that was used. It was sent to this company that will remain nameless and they used it for whatever they wanted it for or put it on whatever platform they did. I'm not being dismissive. I don't know much about that area.
Then I wanted another version of it and I'd already written a quartet version. I'd written what I did in basically the improvisation, the electronic version. I scored that for a string quartet so it could be played live on acoustic instruments. I then put the two together and it became the version that you hear on that record. You'll hear there are some timing anomalies, which I left everything fluid in that.
It's quite a long way from doing something in my own studio on my own for a concrete reason and then think, "Where else can this go? It'd be nice to hear it live." Then suddenly you've got a quartet version. I wonder what happens if there is. Just put them together and what have you got? Another one. That's how I like to see where things end up as well. I'm not very strict about what I think I should be doing.
ezt: You've spoken about this. I'm also fascinated by this idea of the flea market approach to life and music. The serendipity there, but looking into things that maybe are overlooked or discarded by others. In this context, how does there rarities concept, how did this play into that idea?
re: That's a good one. By the way, it was Christian that said that I treat the world like a flea market, which I took as a huge compliment. I was really struck by that. I thought, "Yes, I'd like that. I can live with that." You could walk through the world and get quite jaded. Whereas if you just shift your focus a little bit, the whole of the world changes. You just don't think, "Oh, this is another--" You go into detail more. Or thinking, "What can this do there?" Talking it very simply. When Chris realized that was part of my character, I thought, "We've got a long-term working relationship here. He gets it exactly."
ezt: Looking at your shelf and looking at my shelf, we're guys that probably spend some time looking for things and finding things and bringing them home. How does that thought permeate the new release, considering that these were rarities? These were tracks that maybe didn't make it on the first album and maybe you-- how did that thinking work into the tracks that you chose for this second?
re: That's very easy because before we start actually recording, I'll have amounted maybe 40 tracks. On the one that I'm working on now I think at the moment, I'll be starting to record in December. I think I've got about 24 tracks already. Bearing in mind you only need 12-
ezt: Yes, that's a lot.
re: -most, and it's going to be more than that because I've written some out as well. Say, for example, I, to make it easy, take in 30 tracks. You know that some aren't going to make it, but you know also that some of those are going to be too good to ignore. That's where this comes in because the criticism that I have for running orders will often preclude me putting a good piece on because it simply doesn't fit with the rest on its own. It's a really good piece, but in the company that is, it doesn't sit happily. These rarities are just fabulous because you get all these-- what I still consider good pieces, but they're not chained as they once were or would've been.
ezt: Roger, I'd like to ask you a question, a interesting thing that I saw that came up in your biography. My day job is a administrator at a school for students with learning disabilities.
re: Oh, really?
ezt: I saw that, just out of college, you ran a music therapy course for people with learning disabilities.
re: Exactly.
ezt: I'm just curious what that was at that time in your life, how you ended up doing that, and what that was like.
re: It was in a psychiatric hospital in Colchester, which it's now a city [laughs] that I went to college in. I'd known of this hospital for ages. I cannot remember how I got the job. I might have seen an advert or something.
ezt: Interesting.
re: They wanted a music therapist. Now, I hadn't trained as a music therapist. They had to call me a music instructor, which was a real anomaly because I didn't instruct anyone. One of the things before I started this work, as you may know, I was very interested in the music of Erik Satie, who at the time-- and he died in '25, but he was proposing this new way of looking at music. Which he called “furniture music,” but we now call ambient music.
It was music that you could put on and forget about, that wasn't intrusive. This led me to thinking of what other ways you can use music that's not in the traditional mode of entertainment. There are lots that you can think of once you start thinking about it, is ceremonial music, music for rights, weddings, funerals, and what have you. Music for celebrations. There are stacks of uses for music.
One of them, which I was able to explore here, was in the therapy line. Where does music put you when you are listening to a certain music? Does it make you want to talk to each other? A lot of this was about socializing. People get very lonely and insular. A lot of what I was doing was trying to bring them out and make them aware that there are other people around their lives. If not in it, they're around there. They're available.
The most thing that I did because at this time-- this is really early '80s. The hospital was laid out almost like-- no I'm hesitant to say, because this really paints too strong a picture. Like a Victorian asylum where people had occupational therapy so they'd be making wicker baskets and things like this.
ezt: Sure. Right.
re: Which I thought that's just making people work all the time. [laughs] They didn't come here to do that. I made a point that whenever they came to see me, they could do whatever they liked. Don't beat each other up. [laughs]
ezt: They didn't have a task.
re: Exactly that. That is listening to music, talking, doing paintings, and drawing, and what have you like that. That I did for two and a half years. It was very good for me later because I saw that it gave me an idea of the strength that you can find in music. It allows you to remove yourself from a place that you don't particularly like into a place you do like very much. I've continued that in my work which is why often they're very intense short pieces.
Because to develop them, that means you know what are you doing. You're just basically saying the same thing, but in a bit of a more clever way, which doesn't mean anything to me. It's a valuable point, but then it came after two and a half years. I thought I've done my bit. At that time-- I think this is how it worked. I'd sent a tape. My brother and I, before we lived so close. He now lives very near me in the middle of nowhere really.
I sent him a tape of my current music at the time, and he was just coming up to record Apollo with Danny Lanois. That's when my recording life was launched. I'd always been playing and recording, but that was the break into the professional. Because I've done that, the kind of music therapy I suppose, and that was the world I was interested in, in music that doesn't have to have key latches. Do you understand?
ezt: Yes.
re: Things that you can easily latch onto. That worked perfectly for Apollo and later work that I did.
ezt: Oh, really cool. I thank you for tying it into your work as of late. It's something that it sounds like it was a very formative period.
re: It did me a lot of good up to two and a half years, and then I had to get at it.
ezt: Yes. Well, there's a shelf life for everything.
re: Yes, exactly.
ezt: When people listen to either the album that preceded this one or they hear this, what do you hope people walk away with after they're done listening or hearing something like this in a live performance? What kinds of things are you hoping that people-- and you just mentioned the idea of latching, but what do you hope people latch onto when they do hear your work lately?
re: I've never specified that because you can go somewhere with a person and the two of you will have a completely different experience in the same place. It's beyond me, I think, to say, "I hope they feel this," because I've got no idea what they're going to get. They may get some sense of calm in a world that's now basically uncontrollable. That's what I hope is that they've got a place they like going to.
ezt: Coming up what's the next things coming up for you that people might be interested in following or learning about?
re: Well, I've decided a few months ago to stop playing live for a while. They can look forward to not seeing me on any posters saying at a theater near you tomorrow. I wanted a break just to do new material. As I said to you, I'm starting to record in December for next year's release. You're thinking in such long stages here, which I can't remember it being this long before. The first bit is going to be recorded in December, then February and April. Then there's a break to get all the vinyl that we need from whoever's hoarding the vinyl these days.
The release will be in October ('25). There's a long way. For me, this is the critical time because it's getting the pieces that are going to be on that record forever. For some reason, this one has been playing on my mind more than many. It might be a question of my aging or adding to, because as I said, it's going to be a continuation of the last two. Adding to something that already works very well. Knowing that you can make a Godfather III and kick yourself forever for doing it. [laughs]
ezt: Listen, it's funny. They just remastered and repressed Godfather III. I'm getting ready to write an article about it because I love The Godfather III. Folks of my age, the point I'm going to hope to make is that it was of my generation. It was The Godfather of my generation. It was you had a little identity whereas the older ones were like that they were great, but they didn't belong to me. I love The Godfather Part III. Go ahead, make a Godfather Part III. I don't care.
RE: Oh, bless you. Well, with that in mind, I'll get on with it.
ezt: Very good.
re: Well, a pleasure to speak to you, Evan.
ezt: Thank you so much for your time again and be well. Best of luck and we'll see you around.
re: I look forward to it.
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