Roger Eno announces new solo album
Roger Eno
The Turning Year
Vinyl / CD / download / stream
Deutsche Grammophon 22nd April 2022
Stream and share album title track The Turning Year here on Apple Music and Spotify, Pre-order
Roger Eno is a British composer and musician whose distinctive style
as a recording artist has attracted a cult following. Last year he
made his debut on Deutsche Grammophon with Mixing Colours, his first
duo album with his brother, Brian, which was released to great
acclaim. Now Roger’s latest solo album, The Turning Year, is set for
release on 22 April 2022.
The Turning Year allows the listener to step through Roger Eno’s
looking-glass, filled with glimpses of pastoral scenes and
free-flowing, affecting compositions. These pieces are exquisitely
realised by Eno as pianist, and he is joined on some tracks by the
lauded German string ensemble Scoring Berlin. With a blend of recent
compositions and live favourites from Eno’s concert repertoire, the
album offers a comprehensive presentation of the composer’s solo
work. “The Turning Year is like a collection of short stories or
photographs of individual scenes, each with its own character but
somehow closely related to the other,” explains Eno. “Listening to
it made me think about how we live our lives in facets, how we catch
fleeting glimpses, how we walk through our lives, how we notice the
turning year.”
Listeners have the chance to sample a flavour of The Turning Year’s
haunting beauty today, with the release of the title track as its
first single. Here Eno’s melodic solo piano is underscored by a
beautiful string orchestration. Listeners can witness the interaction
between the players in a live performance video recorded at Berlin’s
legendary Teldex Studio.
“When Deutsche Grammophon released Mixing Colours, I took it as a
real honour and a tremendous compliment,” recalls Roger Eno, a
musician known for his lack of pretension. “I never expected that
the invitation would lead me to a solo album with them. It gave me the
chance to reflect on my intense love for music and the area of Britain
where I live. And I thought about how Britain is now, a place of
division and growing inequality, how it was when I was growing up, and
about my nostalgia for a better place that no longer exists, or
perhaps never existed.”
The Turning Year’s oldest composition, Stars and Wheels, began life
twenty years ago as an improvisation that Roger played on a
single-manual organ in the redundant medieval church of St Gregory in
the Norfolk village of Heckingham. He recorded it soon after in his
home studio and, by overlapping the speeds at which it was played,
created an aural metaphor for what he calls a state of “glorious
decay”, like that slowly consuming the ancient walls of the church.
Stars and Wheels was further transformed last summer as Eno worked
with the album’s producer Christian Badzura, DG’s Vice President
A&R New Repertoire.
Other highlights on the album include Hymn, a slow paean originally
conceived as a solo improvisation; A Place We Once Walked, which opens
the album and sets its emotional heartbeat; the mantra-like simplicity
of Innocence; On the Horizon, a slowly unfolding meditation on
uncertainty and ambiguity; Something Made Out of Nothing, built around
the unsettling yet strangely comforting clash of semitones; and Hope
(The Kindness of Strangers), a piece touched by the utmost tenderness
and compassion.
Eno was born in the Suffolk market town of Woodbridge. He became
immersed in music at school and bought a battered upright piano with
money earned every Saturday as a butcher’s boy. His musical
education continued at Colchester Institute School of Music. After a
brief interlude playing jazz piano in private clubs in London, he
returned to East Anglia.
As well as first collaborating with his brother Brian and Daniel
Lanois in 1983 on Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, he has made
several solo albums and other collaborative pieces with the likes of
Peter Hammill, No-Man (co-founded by Steven Wilson) and his first
‘band’, the ambient supergroup Channel Light Vessel, whose line-up
included Laraaji, Kate St. John, Bill Nelson and Japanese cellist
Mayumi Tachibana. Roger has also acted as Musical Director for
acclaimed actor Tim Robbins.
Within the realm of film music, he and his brother have contributed to
David Lynch’s Dune(1984), Adrian Lyne’s 9½ Weeks (1986) and Dario
Argento’s Opera (1987), whilst their score for Danny Boyle’s BBC
mini-series Mr. Wroe’s Virgins was nominated for a BAFTA in 1993.
Separately, as a solo composer, Roger scored Trevor Nunn’s highly
acclaimed production of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal at London’s
National Theatre and, more recently, Nick Hornby’s celebrated TV
series State of the Union.
For many years Roger Eno has lived in a small town on the border of
Suffolk and Norfolk. Those two rural counties, with their quiet lanes,
medieval churches, and waterways, have given focus and intensity to
the natural introspection of his music. He has described his creative
process as one of “decomposing”, of finding and sleeping on an
idea, waking early the next morning and stripping away all excess from
it to reveal its essence.
The Turning Year includes booklet notes by Roger Eno and cover artwork
by his daughter, Cecily Loris Eno.
Roger will perform music from the album at Haus Zenner in Berlin’s
Treptower Park (12 May) and the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room in
London as part of Purcell Sessions (14 May)
(http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/gigs/roger-eno-x-lco?eventId=893699)0.
01 A Place We Once Walked
02 Slow Motion
03 Introit
04 Hymn
05 Clearly
06 The Turning Year
07 Bells
08 Hope (The Kindness Of Strangers)
09 On the Horizon
10 Innocence
11 Something Made Out Of Nothing
12 An Intimate Distance
13 Stars and Wheels
14 Low Cloud, Dark Skies
Listeners can witness the interaction between the players in a live
performance video recorded at Berlin’s legendary Teldex Studio.
Watch the video for ‘The Turning Year’ from 2pm GMT here (
https://de-grammophon.cimediacloud.com/r/cBc0eCBGnSjm )