Dominic Miller about the new album "Absinthe" – "It's highly energetic"

"I'm the same as Sting, we work very similar. We always like to take different roots" said Dominic Miller in May 2018. "My new album is highly energetic. There's quite a lot of power – especially for ecm records. We play some grooves, really hard grooves. It's nothing like the previous album".

                                                                                                                                                          photo: promotional materials

Marcin Obłoza: One of your new composition is entitled "Bicycle". 

Dominic Miller: I can't remember why I called it like that. It's got a circular kind of movement, it has no beginning and no end. That's what I feel when I'm on a bike – it's a sort of meditation. You keep going and going and going... uphills, downhills... comfortable sections, difficult sections... but you never stop. I like that constant movement. "Bicycle" is a good metaphor for something that's constant.

How long had you been recording the new album?

Two days.

So it will be quite raw material. 

Well, it's just raw like all ecm records. All these albums were done in two or three days. That's the philosophy of the label – to capture a moment. If you spend too long over something, you'll lose a lot of sincerity and honesty. It's like a first love – you can't recreate that. What we do with ecm is to record that initial spark of communication. That's what you hear. It has got mistakes or misarticulated notes, that's true. But that's what makes it beautiful, I think. It's a completely new chapter. I'm not sure what it is, you just have to wait and see. It's very difficult to describe music verbally.

I noticed, that people like to describe music like a fine arts, just to make a specific description of a sound. 

That's a very good thing that you say, because my new album is directly inspired by painters. They were hanging around in the south of France around the beginning of the 20th century. I wanted to capture that energy, that not just painters, but writers and thinkers, had around that time in France. In the south particularly, where the light is magic and there's a sort of uncomfortable feeling about the mistral. Everyone thought that those artists were crazy. No one took them seriously, but they still created something amazing – e.g. Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, Vincent Van Gogh or Paul Cezanne. They were really breaking down the barriers. I wanted to make an homage to them, all these crazy pioneers. I'm trying to create that energy on the new album.

"Absinthe" will be released on the 1st of March via ecm records.

Dominic Miller will be on tour in February and March 2019.