William Eggleston, the storied photographer and magnet for indelible images that are etched into the retinas of many an aficionado of the camera-abetted arts, is also, it turns out, a formidable musician—with a debut album, Musik, coming out this October to add to his otherwise visual body of work. The 78-year-old artist began playing piano while he was a child in Mississippi and, decades later, in the 1980s (with little other seeming love for technology in evidence), took to the sounds of the Korg OW/1 FD Pro synthesizer. He recorded music onto floppy discs that went unheard until they started being culled for a 13-track album to be released this fall by the Bloomington, Indiana-based indie record label Secretly Canadian, which has also put out music by Antony and the Johnsons, Bon Iver, the War on Drugs, and Yoko Ono, among many others. (The album was produced by Tom Hunt, co-founder of the storied reissue label Numero Group.)
The album will be released on October 20. Until then, a taster track—big and dramatic but not especially representative of the whole, which includes other more expressly electronic tracks that tend toward the spacey and the celestial—can be heard now for the first time.