Instrumental music has been called the sound of thought. One of art’s grand mysteries is its ability to convey stories and emotions without a single word, especially in sonic mediums. The music of ambient minimalist composer Roger Eno taps into this ability, at times relating moments of his life and the feelings that accompanied them—precisely occupying those emotional gaps that defy diction. In a 2023 interview with his label, Deutsche Grammophon, he described his last album, The Skies, they shift like chords, as “… a collection of musical poems— poems use a delicacy that often obscures the real meaning. They’ll dress it up as something else so that the listener can have something to pleasantly puzzle over.”

In the same interview, Eno stated that he doesn’t consider himself a classical pianist. This notion challenges the preconceptions of anyone who has followed his discography, inviting us to reexamine his work without the limitations of cultural categorization.

Since 1983, Eno has taken listeners on such journeys through his 29 studio albums and innumerable performances. Along the way, his signature blend of melodically introspective minimalism and classical instrumentation has come to occupy a lane of its own, even appearing in motion pictures, including the likes of Trainspotting (1996) and Dune (1984). On March 29th, 2024, Eno crafted an auditory journey for an audience at National Sawdust— guiding them through hand-picked pieces of his discography alongside a string quartet from the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME). What follows is a series of vignettes from that evening. 

MORNING CHORDS

Upon jovially greeting the audience, Eno explained that the night would begin with “Morning Chords”—an unreleased piece that he uses to ease himself into the day. Eno’s piano began to tell this story with a patiently unfolding chord progression. An oddly fitting swell of microphone feedback rushed in at this moment—“That’s tasty,” he remarked. At its plot twists, a warm bed of strings joined the progression. They repeatedly replied to developments with an unchanging, hollow chord until the resolution. As the piano came to a grand revelation, the quartet concluded with an unexpected, synchronized slide— shifting to the same chord in a higher register. This shift set the night’s precedent for Eno’s innovative incorporation of the quartet. A slow-shifting slideshow projection of Eno's photography, displaying introspective imagery including train tracks, liminal architecture, power lines, and dead bees, accompanied the music as visual manifestations of his thoughtful style.

SHADOW CLOCK

Upon introducing his third piece, Shadow Clock, Eno said the following: “Time is a mystery, what is it? I think it's a vacuum until it's filled with events. You can’t actually think of time, but you can think of what you’ve done in it. And I was pondering such mysteries when I came up with the image of an Egyptian sundial or an hourglass– a means to physically see time move. But it’s not an object, not something that we can hold,” he began to play the chords, “So our descriptions and thoughts on time only revolve around past events.”

This story began with an abstract conversation between the piano and quartet, their call and response pushing the melodic progression down a dark road. The  piano’s melody unfolded in sparse trills. The strings replied using harmonics and overtones in an ambient fashion, creating a pulsing acoustic soundscape. These layers would sometimes rhythmically lock, making the entire ensemble sound like a single, lush instrument. This was a textural palette that sounded like a grandfather clock torn apart by a black hole. Well lost within this melodic labyrinth, the story shifted into its second act with a melancholy soliloquy from Roger’s piano. 

As this exploration approached a fork in the road with a repeating baseline, the visual accompaniment arrived upon an old wedding picture. As he built the baseline, Eno began to recollect: “That’s my older sister getting married to an American GI in Britain in about 1963. I was three years old and saw very little of her throughout dear life. Sweetheart, she was…”. 

This moment framed Eno’s compositions as vignettes of his life—as the sound of his memories. 

As the piano grew into a final epiphany, the strings slowly faded back into focus with a hair-raising leading line. Together, they built into a bitter-sweet climax that led the audience out of the melodic maze with more questions than answers. 

TAPESTRY

In times when Eno incorporated vocals into his performance, he was joined by composer and visual artist Cecily Eno—his daughter. On one of their collaborative compositions, “Tapestry,” she took the stage to guide the piano’s dark motif with a megalithic, a-lyrical melody. It began with a one-note piano pedal as Cecily started to paint a sprawling melodic landscape with a single, drawn-out “oooh.” Having brought the image into focus, ACME provided its depth and color. Together, they went on a melodic journey that swelled into a break—a return to the original piano pedal accompanied by Cecily’s same vocalizations. In a testament to the power of repetition, they returned the audience to where the piece began—in a perspective forever altered by its journey

Eno is a writer of visual introspection. He approaches his instrumental compositions as a storyteller. Eno not only aims to create beautiful harmonic structures–he builds such structures against the backdrop of stunning landscapes and potent memories. The show nearly felt autobiographical with his anecdotes in between works, and the visual component added to that journey. He painted vignettes of his life, unveiling the landscapes and moments that breathed life into his works.

In song, melodies and their textures take on the role of words in a story. They even take one to the places that lyrics can’t—the blank spaces left in a picture drawn by 1,000 words. For every named emotion, there lies an ineffable feeling. These complex points within the spectrum of human perception are articulated by sound and vision, the domain of Roger Eno’s music.

About Nikolas-Kaan Yilmaz

Nikolas Yilmaz is a Turkish-Bulgarian writer and musician based in Brooklyn. He is currently the editorial intern at MOTIF, an editor at Rambler Magazine, and composes for multiple recording and touring projects. Yilmaz has been organizing, performing, and documenting NYC cultural events since 2019.