Tom Rogerson with Brian Eno - Finding Shore

From Deep Oceans comes the new release Finding Shore featuring Tom Rogerson with Brian Eno. It includes 13 elegant and evocative tracks assembled by Rogerson in collaboration with 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." As a 17-year-old he had the odd contrast of being taught by the composer Harrison Birtwistle but also working a job playing lounge piano in a dilapidated hotel in Peterborough: "It was classic faded grandeur, hilarious, Fawlty Towers, English culture at its best," Rogerson says. Within that oddly formative experience, his practice as an improvisor developed: "I'd come in and mess around, it was my way of not thinking," as he puts it.

As an improvisor, Rogerson is keen to suggest that "my music is never about anything" and that "nothing inspired this record"... but agrees that as improvisation taps so directly into the subconscious, everything did. So that chance meeting with Eno and subsequent conversation about the Suffolk landscape did find its way into Finding Shore. "I do totally hear it, I'll listen and think 'oh that sounds like the bells at Woodbridge, that's the birds, the wind rustling in the reeds.' I think it permeates my music, and Brian's ambient records."

Side A

1. Idea of Order at Kyson Point

2. Motion in Field

3. On-ness

4. March Awa

5. Eastern Stack

6. Minor Rift

7. The Gabbard

8. Red Slip

Side B

1. Quoit Blue

2. Marsh Chorus

3. An Iken Loop

4. Chain Home

5. Rest

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