Roger Eno to release new EP, Without Wind / Without Air: Rarities
Roger Eno’s third solo album for Deutsche Grammophon, Without Wind / Without Air, was released last autumn to widespread praise from the music press. Now he has returned to the material from the album’s Berlin recording sessions and selected eight evocative and richly varied tracks for a companion EP, Without Wind / Without Air: Rarities.
The new collection features a mix of solo piano pieces and tracks for various combinations of accordion, clarinet, bass, strings and synths. Roger himself plays piano, synths and accordion, and is joined by the Scoring Berlin strings – conducted by Jonathan Stockhammer – producer Christian Badzura (synths), Tobias Fleischer (bass) and Alexander Glücksmann (clarinet). Without Wind / Without Air: Rarities will be released digitally on 26 June 2026, with The Quiet of Snow and False Memory Waltz out as singles on 24 April and 15 May respectively. The EP cover has again been designed by Roger’s daughter Cecily Eno, who has extended the themes of transience and fragility to this collection’s visual identity.
“Delicate, subtle, melancholy and hopeful, the tracks float through higher spheres, seemingly weightless and fragile, but with a deep intensity … A truly heartwarming album”
FAZEmag, on Without Wind / Without Air
“a timeless collection of spectral beauty”
Louder Than War, on Without Wind / Without Air
“Possibly Eno’s finest work to date”
Uncut, on Without Wind / Without Air
“A Roger Eno masterpiece … Beautiful, meditative, contemplative and soul-searching music … [Without Wind / Without Air] is a work of art and one of the best albums of the year”
Spill Magazine
“[Eno] has been getting on with the business of creating deeply touching and often ethereal music in recent times, and Without Wind / Without Air may well be the apotheosis of that mission”
Electronic Sound
Roger will be performing some of this new music, as well as tracks from Without Wind / Without Air and earlier solo DG albums The Turning Year and the skies, they shift like chords, at the atmospheric Union Chapel in London on 21 May 2026. Accompanying him in his first UK live appearance since his 2024 sold-out concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall will be Cecily Eno (vocals) and other special guests on strings, bass and percussion.
Revealing how a Rarities collection comes about, Roger explains that when recording an album for DG he chooses his “strong favourites” from the sessions, which inevitably means some “extremely valuable tracks” have to be temporarily discarded. However, the function of Rarities is that these can then become a collection in their own right – as always, in a carefully chosen order. “By the time a Rarities collection is released,” adds Eno, “it’s like hearing the tracks again for the first time, each one being placed in a position in which it benefits the whole. I must say, I like this selection very much.”
This latest release opens with the solo piano piece Incense. Conjuring “a quiet garden in a Moorish palace”, the music is given time to breathe, individual notes resonating and almost fading into silence. Inspired by Roger’s fascination with time and its passing, Shadow Clock consists of a simple melody surrounded by gently shimmering strings – “above the entrance to the main hall is placed a sundial counting the hours from dawn to dusk [as] you sit under an orange tree in the shade”. Then The Quiet of Snow depicts the pleasant coolness of the snow-capped mountains in the distance: “You never see that snow fall, you never see it thaw, it sits there throughout the years in silence”.
A very different soundworld can be heard at the heart of the album, as Eno takes his original Massacre of the Innocents track and expands it into a three-part sequence – an anguished musical response to recent conflicts, and specifically to the suffering of children, which “rammed home the obscenity of it all”.
False Memory Waltz represents the shadows of the past that haunt historic buildings – “it is the disused ballroom that holds the most potent ghosts of memory. For it is in this room that some people feel certain they can hear music; in this room, in different clothes, they feel sure they once danced.”
The closing track, Getting the Picture, is a cinematic miniature of vast landscapes and mysterious happenings. “Leaving behind everything you’ve seen, you take the road that heads to the mountains. First you must cross the desert where mirages shimmer like lakes, where rocks crawl with lizards and the sun is relentless. You keep your eyes on the snow line, which doesn’t seem to get any closer. There’s no-one else to be seen, you’re on your own, not really knowing where you are going. Heaven, you hope…”