British composer and musician Roger Eno makes his solo debut album on Deutsche Grammophon with the comprehensive The Turning Year. The LP allows the listener to step through Roger's looking-glass, filled with glimpses of pastoral scenes and free-flowing, affecting compositions. These pieces are exquisitely realized by Eno as pianist and he is joined on some tracks by the lauded German string ensemble Scoring Berlin. With a blend of recent compositions and live favorites from Eno's concert repertoire, the album offers a comprehensive presentation of the composer's solo work.

"The Turning Year is like a collection of short stories or photographs of individual scenes, each with its own character but somehow closely related to the other," explains Eno. "Listening to it made me think about how we live our lives in facets, how we catch fleeting glimpses, how we walk through our lives, how we notice the turning year. When Deutsche Grammophon released Mixing Colours, I took it as a real honour and a tremendous compliment. I never expected that the invitation would lead me to a solo album with them. It gave me the chance to reflect on my intense love for music and the area of Britain where I live. And I thought about how Britain is now, a place of division and growing inequality, how it was when I was growing up, and about my nostalgia for a better place that no longer exists, or perhaps never existed."

The Turning Year's oldest composition, "Stars and Wheels", began life twenty years ago as an improvisation that Roger played on a single-manual organ in the redundant medieval church of St Gregory in the Norfolk village of Heckingham. He recorded it soon after in his home studio and, by overlapping the speeds at which it was played, created an aural metaphor for what he calls a state of "glorious decay", like that slowly consuming the ancient walls of the church. "Stars and Wheels" was further transformed as Eno worked with producer Christian Badzura. 

Other highlights include "Hymn", a slow paean originally conceived as a solo improvisation; "A Place We Once Walked", which opens the album and sets its emotional heartbeat; the mantra-like simplicity of "Innocence"; "On the Horizon", a slowly unfolding meditation on uncertainty and ambiguity; "Something Made Out of Nothing", built around the unsettling yet strangely comforting clash of semitones; and "Hope (The Kindness of Strangers)", a piece touched by the utmost tenderness and compassion.

The Turning Year includes booklet notes by Roger Eno and cover artwork by his daughter, Cecily Loris Eno.