When you look at Brian Eno’s career since 1970, you can see a man going forwards and never looking back. From his time with Roxy Music releasing the first two studio albums with the band (Roxy Music and For Your Pleasure), then embarking as a solo artist starting out with Here Come the Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), and Another Green World, following it up by producing bands and artists, ranging from; David Bowie, Devo, Talking Heads, U2, John Cale, Laurie Anderson, and then collaborating with Robert Fripp, Kevin Ayers, Nico, Harmonia, Cluster, and now with Beatie Wolfe.
Wofle, whose described in VICE as a “Musical Weirdo and visionary”, has taken her music for different approaches. Into our solar systems, held a solo exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum of her ‘world first’ designs, and as appointed for the United Nations role model for innovation.
She helped innovated a visual of 800,000 years of NASA’s CO2 data that launched at the Nobel Prize Summit; a Brain installation which was shown at the London Design Biennale in Somerset House, the first bioplastic record she had done with R.E.M’s Michael Stipe, and a collective mail-art project with DEVO’s Mark Mothersbaugh.
For her next collaboration with Brian Eno, that’s a combination that you can’t let go of. The two albums, Luminal and Lateral, are textures that takes us into dream lands and floating into outer space. So, for them to embark on the different parallels they’ve brought to the kitchen table, it seemed like an unexpected idea for them to work together, but it works like a charm.
You have the meditated guidance that surrounds the entire bedroom in your house as you prepare yourself to go to bed for the ‘Milky Sleep’ to begin. It feels like a soothing yet spacey, orientation of taking us into this other universe that’s about to unfold as ‘Hopelessly At Ease’ sees Eno returning back to his Apollo years, continuing where he had left off from the ‘Deep Blue Day’, but adding lyrical lullabies for Wolfe to sing.
Then, on ‘My Lovely Days’ it becomes a country-rock sing-along 12-bar blues structure for Wolfe and Eno, riding along the Western sky in the hottest part of the day during the summertime before diving into the oceanic atmosphere, revealing the tunnels with double-layered guitar textures which speaks of the early Floyd and Crimson’s THRAK-era with a jazzier approach to ‘Play On’.
And now, we go back and forth between Luminal and Lateral. The 8-part suite behind the ‘Big Empty Country’ on Lateral applies a sombering, yet calming arrangement that the duo have envisioned. Its reflection to bring upon a glimmer of hope to be free from all of the chaos we endured five years ago when the world came to a halt due to the pandemic and COVID-19.
The first four parts brings a sense of contacting from other planets, sending Morse code to each other, knowing how’s everything going on their line by experiencing the spirits and the hope they tackle to make sure that they’re still hanging on. And then in the second act, we are outside of the field in the night time, hearing crickets chirping, walking down a quiet section where you can hear a pin drop as you feel a shiver down your spine.
Now back to the Luminal universe! ‘Breath’ has this eerie mellotron-sque, forest sequence, evoking the worlds of Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, and Eno’s collaboration with Cluster. It has some darker passages with an unfold truth, revealing all of the nightmares in front of your eyes that resembles the elements of iamthemorning.
The closing piece ‘What We Are’ returns back to its country roots as Eno and Wolfe, walk home seeing the sun coming across the horizon for a brand-new day that’s about to unfold. But its waltzy approach to reach across the heavens that’s on ‘And Live Again’, makes listeners know that its time move forward and never look back at the past and the present.
