Tom Rogerson
Le nouvel album de Tom Rogerson ‘Finding Shore’ et ces 13 morceaux élégants et évocateurs produits en collaboration avec Brian Eno sont un mélange savamment dosé flirtant entre musique électronique et notes classiques . Finding Shore définit le son de Rogerson, distillant l’essence de sa pratique musicale : de son enfance avec des cours de musique classique, à aujourd’hui.
‘Finding Shore’ est paru le 8 décembre 2018 chez Dead Oceans.
English
Like every child, Tom Rogerson loved to make a noise. Life as an improviser began at a tender age when he would copy his older sister after she’d done her piano practice. « I was three or four, my legs couldn’t touch the ground, » he remembers. « I enjoyed smashing the keys but I then rationalised it into what I do now. »
Rogerson’s new solo album Finding Shore isn’t a discordant, jarring piece however, but 13 elegant and evocative tracks assembled in collaboration with Brian Eno, who he met outside the toilets after a gig. At first the pair didn’t speak about music at all, but bonded over their roots in the Suffolk town of Woodbridge, located on the strange flat landscape of Eastern England, all heathland, military testing sites, estuary mud and the site of the ancient Sutton Hoo ship burial. Finding Shore is the sound of Rogerson distilling the essence of what he does after a protracted musical journey from childhood up until now. He took the traditional route of music lessons and learning notation before starting composing « properly ».
The first day in the studio was instructional in terms of what was to come. Eno had already mic’d up a piano and asked Rogerson to do what he’d normally do at a gig. Rogerson describes what he played as « very emotional, very cathartic, me wailing and screaming, getting quite out there. I thought ‘wow that was just such a perfect 45 minute thing we could just release that’. » But Eno had other ideas, eventually zooming in on just 30 seconds of music, cutting it up and looping it to a form inspired by Eric Satie. The result is the three-minute-long ‘An Iken Loop’, which is now Rogerson’s favourite on the record. The fragment that made the new piece could not, of course, have happened without the preceding improvisation.