Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Clash JUNE 11, 2025 - by Robin Murray

IN THE STUDIO WITH BRIAN ENO AND BEATIE WOLFE

Perusing their audio playground...

There's something enormously revealing about seeing an artist in their own creative domain. The way a studio functions, the manner in which it is decorated, reveals so much about personal processes, the pathways people set up for themselves. It's with no small degree of excitement, then, that Clash heads to West London, tracking down the studio Brian Eno has utilised for over twenty years now.

In a lifetime of creativity, this no doubt ranks as a slightly special week for the producer and sonic theorist, someone who has long since grappled with his self-defined role as a non-musician. Not one but two albums are mere hours away from hitting streaming services, the work of an extensive collaboration with Beatie Wolfe, herself a revered visual artist and musician.

Luminal is more song-based, the structures hanging together like Galaxie 500 at their most weightless; slight Americana traces lean through, with the syrupy slowcore palettes gently unwinding standard ideas on song structure, allowing the energy contained therein to spill out on record. Created alongside this, Lateral is - to use a phrase Eno probably finds slightly reductive, or lacking - ambient, the rivulets of sound bubbling down in the very aura of the room there are absorbed in.

Genial hosts, Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe show a motley crew of journalists around the studio. The main room has been cleared out, with Eno deciding to use it as a community space - on Tuesdays he hosts an acapella group, whose repertoire he assures us "goes all the way from doo-wop, to more doo-wop". Local Palestinian groups use the studio as a space to organise and plan, while a separate political group aims to find ways to restore the democratic political process to mass participation. It's all absolutely fascinating.

Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe were drawn together by a mutual interest in one another's visual art projects. Beatie tells the room semi-seriously that the pair met at karaoke - Brian Eno insists his karaoke pick is Only You - before a SXSW Zoom call fully introduced them. Meeting in real life at Somerset House during an exhibition of Beatie's work, the two bonded over a hatred of NFTs, and high-tailed it to the studio, eager to see what would happen.

When they got there, Brian Eno began playing notes on his beloved ukulele, the two teasing them out through the Logic computer programme. "This is the most spartan line-up in history," he assures the assembled throng. "It's just the two of us with one electric guitar. Oh, and we added another right at the end!"

"Part of the idea of this was just, let's go into the studio - two of us - and make something with what's there. That remained the principle, really, of just thinking that every day is a new day, so we'll do something today that we wouldn't have done yesterday or tomorrow. It was a very immediate response to where we were."

Luminal and Lateral represents two different poles, opposing strands of what emerged. One is songs, and the other non-songs - "which was called nongs!" Beatie laughs.

"There were lots of things happening, really at once. And I would say even more than two streams. There were maybe six streams or something, and because there's such a limited language to talk about music, it kind of ends up being more non-songs," she explains. "I don't think we were conscious of any particular trajectory or avenue. We were just making this stuff that was sort of mushrooming anytime we got together."

For Beatie, the limitations of the studio set-up were thrilling. Recently relocating from Los Angeles - where most studios would include dozens of guitars, and an array of mics - using one guitar, with strings a decade old, was completely refreshing. "You're taking the ego out of it," she says. "You're getting back to simplicity and economy."

Brian's beloved Oblique Strategies - a card deck designed to open up creative possibilities - also came in handy. "We would each pull one," he says, "but not reveal to the other person what the card said. So we would then operate under whatever restrictions or freedoms the card gave us and tried to bend the session so it made our card work, and it produced some interesting results."

"It was just happening so fluidly, and it was so much fun," Beatie adds. "I mean, it really sounds like such a trite thing to say, but it was constantly fun. And we were doing things only because they were enjoyable, not with any agenda."

Brian smiles, and adds: "It was all just experimentation, really, and following our noses."

The results speak for themselves. In a crowded field - inaugurated by Brian himself - Lateral boasts some gorgeous ambient work. The references to Big Empty Country put both musicians in mind of the American South West, and places such as Arizona, Utah, and Colorado "I think that's definitely within it," says Beatie. "It's country music. Country in the sense of it being a landscape; a landscape that you can then populate with a person or a voice... or you don't!"

Sonically beautiful, the pieces on Lateral also contain a certain playfulness. "An element that's always been important to me is emptiness, of deliberately leaving a thing so that there's space to imagine moving around within, not filling it up. And a lot of recording is about filling things up," Brian says.

"It used to be limited. You'd have twenty-four tracks, because that's all you could get on tape. I've looked in at sessions where people have had over four hundred tracks full of shite, and you just get this feeling of... they must have been really bored to want to do that. It's just making work for yourself, really, fiddling, of all that stuff... and I don't like fiddling anymore. I like it when I listen to recordings that have a sense of slack, or carelessness. I prefer them when it hasn't been tidied up".

"In painting, you get so many different kinds of texture," he adds. "A finished painting could be one with lots of splashes and dribbles and bits that don't reach the edge of the canvas and so on. That's all fine in painting. But in music, the tendency is for somebody to tidy it all up. 'Oh, there's a bit paint missing on the edge there - let's tidy it!' There's a terrible sort of housewifely tidiness that has entered music because it's with digital it's now possible to fix absolutely everything to some kind of platonic ideal of what a C sharp bass note should be, for example. And there's an incredible industry with fantastic budgets that you could waste your life with. It's quite a nice way to waste your life, sure, but it iswasting your life."

Moving with alacrity, the material on both Lateral and Luminal emerged from a torrent of play, from a river of run. The pair are moving to an emotional response, not a cerebral one. "You'd think that the first question people ask themselves when they're making pieces of music 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 sort of seems like music. Sure, there's an A chord and there's a D minor chord, and there's another chord and there's another one, and that all seems like making music. It's just a sort of routine, in a way. So if we weren't getting a feeling from something, we moved on, or we changed it in some way. I wanted always to be having feelings about it, and strong feelings, if possible; new feelings, new mixtures of feelings. That's what's always what interests me."

Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe's new albums Lateral and Luminal are out now.