Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe : Luminal/Lateral
Brian Eno has been music’s perpetual motion machine for decades, staying busy elevating technology to art, tying sound to social issues, and imbuing media with algorithms allowing audio and video to lumber to life so they grow and change on their own. Over the last 30 years he’s teamed up with electronica acts, poets, prog-rockers and post-punks to expand his and their creative vocabulary. Now he forms a yin to the yang of Beatie Wolfe—a London-based fellow experimenter with proper albums steeped in chamber pop—on two simultaneously released LPs, Luminal and Lateral. The order of artist names on each album’s cover implies which half of the pair supports the other, and both albums have a particular novelty.
The “dream music” of Luminal is a welcome [re]introduction to Wolfe, a back-to-basics recording for someone known less for her catalog and more for projects where she beamed songs into space and turned climate data into installation art. Many of the tracks on Luminal feel like they’re floating in zero gravity, with light-years of distance between every individual guitar pluck and lyric in songs like “Shhh” and “Milky Sleep.” Eno’s studio touches exist here to further turn gauzy Wolfe’s singer-songwriter traditionalism. There’s a shimmer and wobble to “Hopelessly at Ease,” the upbeat highlight “Suddenly,” and more suggesting the sound of these ballads bubbling up and through a stream—or possibly the desert mirage of one.
Meanwhile, Wolfe’s instrumental contributions seem to reside in Eno’s surprisingly structured “space music” on Lateral. If there is majesty to be found in the album’s lone composition, “Big Empty Country,” it is subtle, quiet, simple. The duo construct an homage to math, to symmetry and the straight (lateral) line and even numbers: “Big Empty Country” is presented as a 64-minute single CD track, two equal 32-minute vinyl sides, or eight parts as digital files of 8 minutes each. It’s driven, as much as Eno’s ambient music can be driven, by a persistent two-note motif that re-emphasizes the second note throughout, long pulls on strings and their digitized equivalents, and softly glitching harmonizing and other nudging intrusions. “Big Empty Country” has a repetitive nature one might not expect to associate with this category of Eno’s songwriting, but it’s calming and hypnotic nonetheless.
A partnership simmering since 2022, Wolfe and Eno wanted to fill Luminal/Lateral with concepts and feelings of discovery from multiple different cultures. It might be argued here that more of that discovery, and resultant charm and excitement, lies in Wolfe’s fronting of Luminal, but Lateral could well serve as a safe point of entry for those unfamiliar with Eno’s imposing body of work.
Label: Verve
Year: 2025
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