British composer and multi-instrumentalist Roger Eno has recorded Without Wind / Without Air, his third solo album for Deutsche Grammophon. Following on from the success of The Turning Year (2022) and the skies, they shift like chords (2023), the new album includes both solo piano pieces and tracks orchestrated for various combinations of clarinet, guitar, bass, strings, synths, percussion and electronics. There are guest vocal appearances from soprano Grace Davidson and Roger’s daughters Cecily Eno and Lotti Eno, with Roger himself singing on The Moon And The Sea. Jonathan Stockhammer conducts the Scoring Berlin strings on three tracks, while Eno’s friend and producer Christian Badzura arranged and plays on several tracks as well as having co-written the opening and closing numbers, Forgiveness and After Rain.
The album title comes from the lyrics of Doubled by the Sun, by Italian band The Doubling Riders. “My friend Pier Luigi Andreoni and I worked on various projects together in Italy in the 1990s,” says Eno. “He kindly gave me permission to use this line, which has a wonder-filled, late-summer atmosphere of almost motionlessness and peace.”
The sheer poetry of the lyric was enough for him at first, but has recently taken on a new meaning, as he explains: “I was forced to look at the fragility of species and climate, and their dependence on ‘turns of chance’ and carelessness. This alters ‘without wind, without air’ into a warning, a vision of a terribly bleak future – if any future at all.”
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