Brian Eno 27: Mixing Colours

We don’t know if being Brian’s younger brother has done Roger Eno any favors, but he has managed to build up a catalog of his own brand of ambient music over the decades. Mixing Colours was the Enos’ first released collaboration in decades, and it was apparently built over a period of 15 years.

The brief is very much like the albums Brian did with Harold Budd—Roger plays gentle keyboards, mostly in the acoustic or electric piano family, and Brian treats the sound or adds his own touches. Each track’s title is derived from a specific shade or tint, so whether or not they convey an accurate representation of a mood is up to the individual. That being so, we found “Snow” to be very pretty and engaging, even before we checked to see what it was called. “Celeste” seems to be one of the more musically developed pieces, as opposed to a sketch, and “Slow Movement: Sand” does convey a certain majesty as it builds. By comparison, “Desert Sand” is dominated by a Brian texture right out of 1976. “Obsidian” breaks from the mold with an organ-based sound, tempered by the more chamber-nursery tone of “Blonde”. The album is easy to have in the background, so one might not notice that the melody of “Spring Frost” turns up again an hour later as “Cerulean Blue”, for example.

Mixing Colours was released at the start of the COVID lockdown, and provided a companion for enforced solitude. Some time afterwards, the Luminous EP presented another seven tracks by the duo, which may be easier to ingest as a shorter program. These were then inserted into the album’s original sequence, which was rereleased as Mixing Colours Expanded. All together, it’s pleasant aural wallpaper from the family dynasty that invented it.

Roger Eno and Brian Eno Mixing Colours (2020)—3
Roger Eno and Brian Eno Luminous (2020)—3