Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe release collaborative albums

Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe have unveiled a pair of collaborative albums at a launch party held at his London studio.

Released today (6 June), the 11-track Luminal features Wolfe on vocals with eight-track companion album Lateral a wholly instrumental ambient affair.

The pair first met through their respective environmental work when they gave a featured talk on ‘Art and Climate’ at SXSW. Eno and Wolfe met again when they were each showing their visual and conceptual art pieces at separate galleries in London – and a plan to collaborate on new music soon emerged.

In a launch party Q&A hosted by Grayson Haver Currin, Wolfe expanded upon how the pair began their collaboration: “We met in a Korean karaoke bar where Brian was singing Only You. We then had a couple of calls while I was in LA and soon bonded over a hatred of NFTs [laughs]. We were both getting emails from people saying we should get in on them [buying NFTs], but agreed that it would be like drinking the Kool Aid. We [eventually] ended up in Brian’s studio where he discovered Playbox, which is this native instrument piece of software. There was also an out-of-tune ukulele hanging around the studio. It was all pretty experimental.”

Beatie Wolfe and Brian Eno with Grayson Haver Currin at the Luminal and Lateral launch

No Ego

For Eno, the plan was to deliberately keep the collaboration stripped-back and experimental. He explains: “[We used] a very spartan line-up of instruments. It was just the two of us with one electric guitar, we added another one right at the end [of the sessions]. The guitar strings have been changed once in 40 years –  10 years ago – so they were relatively fresh when we came to use it [laughs].

“Part of the idea of this [collaboration] was ‘let’s just go into the studio, the two of us, and make something with what’s there. Not ‘let’s go in and hire an Ampeg 246 bass cabinet and 16 U 87 microphones. We just thought, whatever is there, we’ll make something with that. That remained the principle of thinking ‘every day is a new day and we’ll do something today that we wouldn’t have done yesterday or tomorrow’. It was a very immediate response to where we were.”

With Wolfe relocating from Los Angeles back to the UK, it was also a chance to reduce the clutter around modern music-making.

She adds: “If you go into any basic studio in LA there’s just this entourage of gear, people and shit. Coming into Brian’s studio and having this ‘hummy’ guitar, I loved that because you’re taking all the ego out of it and getting back to simplicity and economy. It’s like that thing where you’re a kid and you can take a matchbox and make it into a whole world. It was that approach.”

Image credit: Cecily Eno

Play Your Cards Right

A continual touchstone in his career, Eno employed his Oblique Strategies cards to keep recording sessions unpredictable, and most importantly fun. The producer explains: “We used the cards quite a lot and would each pull one out [of the deck] and not reveal to the other person what it said. We’d then operate under the restrictions of freedoms that the card gave us to try to bend the sessions so it made the card work. It produced some interesting results. If Beatie has a card that says “destroy everything” and I have one that says “change nothing and continue with immaculate consistency” then you’ve got two people who are working at cross purposes, which sometimes produces good results. We tried to make it so that every day was a thrill, and it was pretty much.”

Wolfe adds: “It was constantly fun and we were doing things only because they were enjoyable, without any agenda. It was all just experimentation and following our noses. The toolbox expands, but when you start with just one guitar, you’re never going to go crazy.”

Catching Feelings

Central to concept of the collaboration was that the music was an exploration of the concept of ‘feeling’. It was an attempt to trigger feelings – both old and new – and conjure up mixtures of emotions that the pair had never experienced before.

Eno reflects: “You’d think that the first question people ask themselves when they’re making pieces of music in studios would be ‘Am I getting any feeling from this?’ but funnily enough a lot of people don’t. They just go through the mechanics of doing something that seems like making music. It’s just a routine in a way. If we weren’t getting a feeling from something, we moved on.

“I always wanted to be having strong feelings about the music, and new mixtures of feelings… that’s always what interests me.”

‘Art Is How Adults Play’

As ever, Eno was conscious of the space between the musical notes as much as the notes themselves. The graceful, reflective tone of both new albums was deliberate. Eno explains: “I think an element that’s always been important to me is emptiness. Deliberately leaving a thing so that there’s space to imagine moving around within it. Not filling it up. A lot of recording is about filling things up. I’ve walked into sessions recently with people had over 400 tracks full of shite. You just get that feeling of ‘they must have been really bored to do that’. It’s just making work for yourself. Fiddling around. I can hear fiddling and it makes me nervous. When I listen to recordings that have a sense of slight carelessness, I prefer them when it hasn’t been tidied up.

“There’s a terrible housewifely tidiness that’s entered music because it’s now possible with digital means to fix absolutely everything to some kind of Platonic ideal to what a C-sharp bass note should be, for example. There’s an incredible industry of fascinating plugins that you can waste your life with. It’s quite a nice way to waste your life, but it is wasting your life [nevertheless].

“This studio is essentially a play space. A play space for grown-ups. I have this sentence in my book which says, ‘Play is how children learn, art is how adults play’. And this is an adult playroom. It’s lovely, and I’m very lucky to have it.”

Luminal and Lateral are out now on Verve Records. Order here

Featured image credit: Cecily Eno

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