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(2023) Roger Eno - The Turning Year: Rarities
Review:
Following the success of The Turning Year, Roger Eno’s debut solo album for Deutsche Grammophon in April 2022, he continued to focus on expanding and reinventing his repertoire. The result was a mix of brilliant reworks and previously unreleased gems from the album sessions, released in the form of three EPs. Rarities now combines the composer’s EPs, Piano, Bells and Quartets, and complements the complete material with the brand new bonus track “Moving Chords”. Rarities · Piano opens with Eno’s solo piano version of “The Turning Year”. As with so much of his music, this track is deeply rooted in the composer’s autobiography. “It owes its continued existence to my younger daughter,” he notes. “For years it was known as ‘Lotti’s Favourite’, as whenever she heard me play it, she’d remark on how much she liked it. The piece has a curious mix of light and darkness, a mix I am constantly striving to work with.” This first EP presents three previously unreleased tracks, starting with two further solo piano works, “Or So I’ve Read” and “Softly”, which explore shared musical material from strikingly different perspectives. “Still Day” features yearning improvisations from folk-fiddler Rosie Toll, the ambiguities of its title and music embracing both the promise of early morning and the mysterious calm that so often follows daybreak. All three EPs draw from the fabric of Eno’s life, his family and the landscape and history, country lanes and waterways of his native East Anglia. Rarities · Bells evokes echoes from a distant past and the consolation of quietude. “The area in which I live is blessed with isolated medieval churches, many of which are open to those who wish for silence, such as myself,” says Eno. This second EP couples a grand-piano version of its title track with another that contains the striking duetting voices of his daughters, Cecily and Lotti, first heard together on Roger’s performance for NPR’s Tiny Desk. Cecily is also the creative force behind Roger’s visual material for this and the album project. The collaborative spirit continues in the third EP, Rarities · Quartets, performed by a quartet of players from the string ensemble Scoring Berlin with whom Eno recorded some of the tracks on The Turning Year. A melancholy atmosphere prevails here, in three reimagined versions of “Slow Motion” and the equally moving “Venerable Dilemma”. “I cherish the beauty of working with others,” says Roger Eno. “Music to me is an almost symbolic action, involving, as it does, ‘harmony’ – a synonym for love, consensuality and friendship. These EPs contain a great deal of myself and of others.” — deutschegrammophon
Track List:
01 - The Turning Year
02 - Still Day
03 - Bells
04 - Softly
05 - Slow Motion 1
06 - Slow Motion 2
07 - Slow Motion 3
08 - Venerable Dilemma
09 - Moving Chords
10 - Or so I've Read
11 - Bells (with Voices)
Media Report:
Genre: ambient, classical
Country: UK
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)
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