Roger Eno - the skies: rarities (2024) [Hi-Res]

Composer and pianist Roger Eno releases his new 8-track mini-album entitled the skies: rarities. It features unreleased material from the recording sessions for his second DG solo album the skies, they shift like chords. That album traced an evocative and thought-provoking path through sound and silence. Its melancholy tone, echoes of which can be heard on rarities, had much to do with the threat posed to the environment by intensive farming and climate change.

“When I come to record what will become an album I usually have an excess of ideas,” says Roger Eno. “This allows me, at the end of the process, to make a definitive ‘collection’ with a deeply considered running order. The latter is of great importance to me. Thus I often find myself in the luxurious position of having not one but two albums’ worth of material I’m happy with – rarities is that second album.”

As well as solo piano pieces, rarities includes one track for choir and electronics (Patterned Ground), and one for string orchestra (Breaking The Surface), for which the instrumentalists of Scoring Berlin were asked to both play from the score and improvise. Guitarist Jon Goddard, meanwhile, appears on Into Silence, giving the track what Eno calls “a particular flavour it would otherwise have lacked”. In addition, the album features the 2023 World Piano Day track Through the Blue (Piano Version) and the Amazon Original track Above and Below.