The classical-ambient composer and younger brother of Brian Eno performed a rare concert in London, his first since his sold out show at Queen Elizabeth Hall back in 2024. He released his studio album ‘Without Wind, Without Air’ last year from which he also played.
Eno began with an unreleased composition called ‘The Woman’: glistening keys caught amongst a steady tip-toe tread. The evening contained other such unrecorded compositions after Eno had decided to change his musical direction, accompanied by a clarinetist and violinist duet who performed the slow winding ‘Illusion’ and ‘Hotel de Paris’; the latter a dreamscape lament dedicated to a derelict 1800s hotel in Norfolk.
The bass clarinet produced an almost cellic sound in ‘Shadow Clock’, from Eno’s last studio album, and then, inspired by the fragility and malleability of gold, he performed a guttural, reverberating and sinister, tense piece called ‘Thin Gold’, largely fleshed out by the violin and clarinet duo. Pianist guest player William Ferguson, whom Eno dubbed ‘Vinegar Will’ due to the acrid nature of his playing, performed an avant-garde stop-start 10 minute solo, with flecks of echoing keys and bass key crashes.
Eno selected again from his last studio album with ‘The Quiet of Snow’; tiptoes of keys which, despite the track’s name, had a warm undertone to it. He then performed ‘Alembic Distillation’ composed in the style of Bach but with more space to experiment, which by pathetic fallacy sounded like falling drops as the name of the piece suggested. Eno was also accompanied by his daughter Cecily, who sang traditional folk song ‘Constant Lovers’.
By way of revisiting his younger self, Eno documented his time playing tuba in a Colchester jazz club in ‘A Place We Once Walked’ from his 2022 studio album, ‘The Turning Year’, a slowly unravelling piece also inspired by Irish writer John Banville’s novel ‘Ghosts’. The four of them ended on a piano duet with Cecily in sea-forlorn folk song, ‘There Was a Ship’.
09/09/26: Roger Eno @ Union Chapel, London.
Photos © Peter Tainsh.
© Ayisha Khan.