Appreciators of William Eggleston’s art often have a fondness for music, and the renowned photographer’s been known to associate with more than a few musical artists himself. And, as Memphis Flyer readers may recall from our 2017 coverage of his debut album, Musik, he’s also a gifted self-taught pianist who’s played classical works by ear and improvised his own compositions since childhood.
That album, as we noted upon its release, was played and recorded by Eggleston on an instrument he was enamored of in the early 1990s, the Korg 01/W sampling keyboard. “It’s manufactured in Tokyo, but a hundred percent of it is a bunch of engineers in California,” he told us at the time. “It makes maybe a billion different sounds. When this model of Korg came out, I was so enchanted with the machine.”
And he was inspired, using the keyboard’s recording function to preserve many extemporaneous compositions in which he could command a variety of orchestral sounds at once, riffing out entire concertos in one sitting. Selections from those recordings formed the basis of Musik.
Now with today’s single, “Improvisation,” Eggleston is announcing another album, 512, to be released November 3rd on the Secretly Canadian imprint. Produced by Tom Lunt, 512 features four standards, “Ol’ Man River,” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” “Over the Rainbow,” and “Onward Christian Soldiers,” along with the originals “Improvisation” and “That’s Some Robert Burns.”
In a departure from the free-wheeling soliloquies of Eggleston’s debut, Lunt invited musicians Sam Amidon and Leo Abrahams to collaborate on 512. This openness to collaboration led to Brian Eno performing bells on “Improvisation,” an introduction of sorts to 512’s piano-driven palette.
512, produced in one day in 2018, is named after the room where it was recorded, the Parkview apartment in Memphis where Eggleston lived for many years. The resulting 512 is a sparse, stark work that holds a mirror to music that Eggleston has internalized most profoundly. “I’ve never heard anything like it,” Eggleston notes in a press release. “It’s very modern.”
