Brian Eno‘s collaboration with multimedia artist Beatie Wolfe produces a slow-down moment in the midst of a world run amok on the meditative, dual-disc release of Luminal and Lateral.
Release date: June 6, 2025 | Verve Records | Instagram | Facebook | Stream/Purchase
My favorite forgotten album I ever had – forgotten in the sense that I can’t recall the name – was on cassette tape. It was a mixtape with a white J-card that had a list of song title and artists, and I’m sure it came with a lifetime guarantee from the Mother’s Records & Tapes. The songs were pieces done by indigenous artists from around the world, in addition to artists like Robert Fripp, Peter Gabriel, Peter Hammill, and Brian Eno. The first song on the album was by Peter Hammill – a dark, proggy exploration of existential pain. He had a dark, theatrical voice that captured me. There were two songs from Robert Fripp’s Exposure: “North Star”, featuring soulful Daryl Hall vocals and Peter Gabriel’s solo piano performance of “Here Comes The Flood”.
That latter song is one of the top ten songs of all time: it’s a staggering profession of lament over a world that was destroyed by our own egregious arrogance. And it has always stood to reason that Brian Eno’s artistic touch has forever extended way beyond his own compositions. Eno’s contribution to Fripp’s version of this song is felt in its sheer intensity and deliverance: his synthesizers are the water rushing in. The piano and Gabriel’s voice are what’s left behind in the aftermath of the flood, flotsam and jetsam be damned (in retrospect, I forgot how in the room “North Star” felt, and that made it so much more powerful in context of a lot of the more angular pieces that populated that album).
So that was my first exposure, no pun intended, to the world of Brian Eno. Since then, he’s been a constant in my listening journal, whether I wanted him to (Ambient 1: Music For Airports) or not (I’m looking at you U2). He’s a titan of modern music, the composer of the start-up sound from Windows 95 – a sound that’s as much a part as the Earthen ether as the movement of the molecules that cause wind.
That’s it, really: Eno is like the planet’s gentle exhale – a deep breath in, a moment to pause – and a single breath out. It’s in that space that Eno’s music exists.
His collaboration with performance artist Beatie Wolfe on Luminal, the first of the two-disc releases, is a gentle exploration of life at its most mundane. The songs, mostly composed on whatever was lying around the studio, exist in a proto-experimental-folk forest of mosses, ferns, and thick trees that hug the ground cover.
The songs on Luminal are simple enough to give both producers room to build the sounds they want until they fill up the room. Many of the arrangements are strangely quirky. The fairy-tale-like chords and melodies on “Play On” or the barely-there lullaby of “Shh” make it feel as if you’ve just walked into a carnival run by the ‘cool’ kids, having eaten a handful of shrooms an hour before. It’s like Mazzy Star after ten years of AA and a dozen therapists. Whatever it is, it’s definitely dealing with the process of bending minds.
Lateral, the second release in the combo, represents the edges of the breath, the warm molecules that quickly cool and separate from the pack. In some ways, all of Eno’s work has represented a post-apocalyptic clearing of the fog. “Big Empty Country” – a lingering, spacious tone-poem of subtle power – is embedded within these molecules, and they build on one another to create slightly different versions of the same thing. Each song on the album is another version of the previous track, a cascading network of notes that comes from the playful collaboration the two artists have presented.
As a teacher, for the past two decades I’ve played Ambient 1: Music for Airports for my students when they’ve been doing independent work. To look out at the kids and see them surreptitiously slipping into a cave space in which they can reflect and truly think, based on the frequencies of a few notes, has been affirming. While Lateral could never be at that level, the record is the closest Eno has come in decades to tapping into that same sentiment. It’s focused, humble and reflective, like all of us should strive to be.
In the end, Luminal and Lateral act as two effective artifacts of just simply existing. The albums don’t ask for much more than a chance to take their shoes off, and take a load off the ol’ stompers. Likewise, neither Eno nor Wolfe has set out to represent anything more than that. A collaboration amongst friends sometimes produces the best stuff, and I’ve known that since I had that mixtape shoved in my Walkman way back in 1981.
