Tom Rogerson

Tom Rogerson is a composer, improvising pianist and keyboardist. Born in Suffolk, Tom studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music. Later he began exploring electro-acoustic improvisation, which led to the formation in 2007 of the experimental electronic-rock band Three Trapped Tigers, who have performed and collaborated with a diverse array of artists including Brian Eno, Deftones, Dillinger Escape Plan, Stale Storlokken (Supersilent), and Karl Hyde (Underworld). Tom’s debut album - ‘Finding Shore’ - will be released in December 2017 on Dead Oceans, a collaboration with Brian Eno.

“The album started with a familiar problem: what's the point of recording improvisation, and how can you make an album out of it? For Brian, the solution was to be found in recording me play over 15 days, hours and hours of material, and capturing both the audio of the piano and the MIDI of my performance through a device called the Moog Piano Bar. In that way, he would be able to produce me without disrupting the immediacy/spontaneity of the improvisation.

In the end, this unintentionally led to a simple dynamic where I was improvising the notes and he was improvising the sounds, and the two were interacting and reacting. This was a totally new and inspiring process that immediately took me away from the 'comfort zone' of the piano as an instrument.

So what you hear on the record are a string of mostly one take improvisations of this nature: some of them featuring the piano predominantly, and others with no piano at all (we just left the audio out.) What I find most interesting is the way that the sounds are distinctly electronic, but are clearly being played in real time by an instrumentalist, with all the wonkiness and inaccuracy that implies. It's very unusual to hear these sounds in this context, and for that reason I feel like we found something quite different.

Brian and I met through a shared heritage, and a mutual interest in its landscapes. The album conveys a great deal of this sense of place, speaking to nostalgia, history, transformation, darkness and threat. The coastline shifting under geological stress, eroding land and buildings, the gradual decay of the decommissioned lighthouse, all but lost to the power of the sea. Birdsong in the reeds, a distant foghorn from an unseen vessel, the sheltered communities of my childhood, Iken Loop, Gabbard, Kyson Point: all are to be found in the collective subconscious of ‘Finding Shore’.”