Brian Eno & Beatie Wolfe – ‘Luminal’ and ‘Lateral’ albums review: Ambient lullabies shine a light in the dark
THE SKINNY: A reassuring arm reaches out of the pensive, ambient pool on Luminal, gifted with an unerring ability to penetrate a strange, ruminative ache in your gut and somehow offer understanding and ethereal soothe. It sounds preposterously lofty, but when Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe’s new album twofer along with Lateral gets it right, electric epiphany can be experienced sincerely movingly.
Both major figures in music, science, and politics’ intersection, the pair first met as leading forces in environmentalism, talking on the acclaimed ‘Art and Climate’ segment of 2022’s SXSW. Crossing paths again in the London arts and exhibit world, the seeds of a joint two-album exploration were sown, examining the sea of feelings and emotional sensations that crash and wave in the human condition’s grand universality.
Eno’s credentials in the arena of stirring sonic evocations and cerebral rigour are well-established, the former Roxy Music synthesist a professional coaxer of deep artistry from David Bowie, Talking Heads and U2, as well as conjuring some of art-pop’s most celestial gems. Yet it’s Luminal that offers the albums’ most affecting moments, Wolfe’s primary half of the collaboration and conceived as “dream music”.
Soaking in a vat of chromatic psychedelia and digital folk, Luminal casts a profound aura of introspection across its surrealist lullabies, Wolfe’s guitar and melancholic vocals dancing like light off of Eno’s rich and immersive synth textures and tactile note bends. It’s an aural energy that sounds divine yet pleasingly intimate, with just enough studio atmosphere to feel involved in the pair’s creative process.
It’s Lateral where the magic begins to ebb. Eno’s “space” half of the partnership, the eight parts of ‘Big Empty Country’, seems to wander in familiar ambient territory to anyone who’s accustomed to his output for the last near-century. You either like Music for Airports or you don’t. For the fans, it’s no doubt an exquisite ascent of amorphous keys and swaddling walls of atmosphere, which trigger deep existential musings. For the less patient, supposed profundities may be harder to glean.
It’s difficult not to wonder how Lateral would have fared with the same meditative expanse but twisting and winding through different contours and soundscapes rather than one continual piece best suited for one of his many innovative installations.
Yet through Luminal and Lateral‘s ebb and flow traverse, there’s an unmistakable authority behind its production. Every string pluck, synth wash, or distant percussive glimmer expertly swirled to illicit innate emotional movements that feel extra pertinent in an age choking with the smog of neoliberal business.
Mining solemnity without ever lapsing in pomposity, Eno and Wolfe manage to peak an intriguing and stirring score that, for the most part, achieves its conceptual mission agenda, not producing mere ‘mood’ music but orchestrating ‘feeling’ music, ensuring an essential somatic anchorage that always keeps a poignancy just within reach.
For fans of: Little sailboats drifting into the clouds, illustrated by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
A concluding comment from your inner child: “What happened to your zest for life!?”
Release: June 6th | Producer: Beatie Wolfe and Brian Eno | Label: Verve Records
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