Discover Weekly Archive - part 10

From the album Retreat to Bliss available March 25, 2022 on Western Vinyl.  
Pre-order http://lnk.to/LuhvIV9W

Since the release of his last album – 2017’s Finding Shore, a collaboration with Brian Eno – pianist and singer-songwriter Tom Rogerson’s life has undergone a number of dramatic transformations. While writing his new album Retreat to Bliss, Rogerson had a child, lost a parent, and received his own diagnosis of a rare form of blood cancer. The new decade brought him from Berlin to the Suffolk of his childhood, composing profound pieces of minimal songwriting in the church next to his parents’ home. 

Rogerson studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music under mentors like Harrison Birtwistle, and he made his live debut as an improvising pianist in 2002, before releasing an improvised record with Reid Anderson (Bad Plus) and Mike Lewis (Happy Apple, Bon Iver) in 2004. He formed the band Three Trapped Tigers in 2007, expertly blending elements of electronic, jazz and noise rock into a cohesive whole. The band earned a reputation for innovative live shows and went on to perform and collaborate with artists like Brian Eno, Deftones, and the Dillinger Escape Plan. It was working with Eno, another Suffolk native, that eventually led Rogerson back to his roots and back to a place where he could write Retreat to Bliss, his solo debut album.

“All my life, the piano has been my constant companion, my confessor, my best friend, and my worst enemy,”  Rogerson explains. “I’ve always written music on and for the piano, but it felt too personal, too private to release.”

Indeed, listening to Retreat to Bliss feels almost like eavesdropping, as though you’re crouched in the belfry of a Suffolk church, bearing witness to a form of musical bloodletting. For the first time in his noteworthy career, Rogerson has combined masterful piano playing and subtle electronics with the texture of his own voice, an attempt to express deeply private emotions that were difficult to articulate using instrumental music alone. 

“The last few years have brought some struggle, some joy, and a lot of change. My response has been to retreat to what I trust the most: the piano, my voice, and the landscape I grew up in. That’s how the album got its title, and how I came to be ready finally to release a solo record.”

The eleven tracks that make up Retreat to Bliss were recorded by Leo Abrahams (Brian Eno, David Byrne, Grace Jones) over the course of just a few days, a process that emphasized spontaneity and the artist’s own commitment to improvisation. 

The opening track, “Descent”, begins with a series of spare notes suspended like icicles, an inhalation of breath audible in the void. The emotional piece builds in intensity until Rogerson’s masterful piano playing has completely taken over, conjuring sonic images of rainfall on glass. The piece blends seamlessly into the utterly gorgeous “Oath”, the first track to feature Rogerson’s earnest and unaffected vocals. The collection draws the listener in further with songs like the contemplative “Toumani”, inspired by the music of the Malian kora player of the same name, and the centrepiece “Chant”, in which Rogerson quietly pleads, “Please don’t leave me / in this perfect place.” The album finishes with the climactic “Retreat To” and the brief outro “Coda”, a revelatory diptych that unfolds like a confession, furious and mournful one moment and in the next, simply questioning.

Secular yet devotional, intensely personal yet profound, the experience of listening to Retreat to Bliss seems to evade characterization. It’s physical and emotional, a glimpse into the mind of an artist who has chosen exposure over withdrawal, who uses his command of the piano to chart an unflinching path forward, never looking back.

Tom Rogerson - "Oath"

The Essential Wilbert Harrison

Let's Work Together

Après

Michelle

Start Somewhere

Life Balance

Heard Somebody Whistle

Heard Somebody Whistle (Vikken Remix)

In the Lens, Solo Andata’s fourth full-length album, was born from recordings found in the interstices of decades-old hard drives, lost email threads from disused accounts, and forgotten samples recorded on cassette dictaphones. These fragments were combined and re-worked with newer elements to create an album very much in the spirit of the band’s debut Fyris Swan (Hefty Records, 2006), an album touched by both folk and jazz and swathed in a dusty, narcotic haze.
Solo Andata’s Kane Ikin and Paul Fiocco have always pushed aside the digital studio in favor of a more haphazard and hands-on workshop vibe to their productions. They prefer near-broken acoustic instruments, cheap microphones and, as can be witnessed by their live performances, tend to turn anything they can get their hands on into a beautiful sound-making object.

While there is a raw and guileless nature to the duo’s sound it is precisely this that makes their music so powerful amidst the over-produced cliches of much modern music. The beauty of their work is how simple instruments and objects can be physically manipulated into creating such rich, layered sound. Dark, swaying, almost-looped melodies from piano, woodwinds and horns wrap themselves in smoky obscurity around remnants of percussion and warm beds of noise and the world around us.

In The Lens is very much a late-night record, reflected in the rain-soaked cover imagery, dripping with half-forgotten memories. Jittery yet calming, rhythmic, yet unhurried, it leads you down its dark corridors to a soft resting space. Ikin and Fiocco have created a new story around the chemistry of their creations that were taking place during the early days of their musical explorations.

In The Lens

Separate Lovers

Mean Sun

Market Forces

Van Horn

Van Horn (KarlSayAgain Remix)

It's A Raid

It's A Raid (feat. Post Malone)

Ecstasy

Tondo

Song Machine Episode 2

Désolé (feat. Fatoumata Diawara)

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