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Mojo DECEMBER 2025 - by Victoria Segal

BRIAN ENO & BEATIE WOLFE: LIMINAL

The inbetweeners: Third collaboration of 2025 between well-credentialled duo knocks gently on the doors of perception.

If anyone can get away with calling a record Liminal, it's Brian Eno. While it's generally a word best left for unhelpful labels on art exhibits, here it operates as a kind of verbal remix, an echo of its two predecessors, Lateral and Luminal. Eno's first two collaborations with the tech-minded, eco-alert multi-disciplinary artist Beatie Wolfe were released simultaneously in June: Lateral ("space music," say its creators) documented eight ambient versions of the looped track Big Empty Country, while Luminal ("dream music"), built around one electric guitar, moved through more clear-edged song-based forms, like Slapp Happy bundled up with Primal Scream, or The Velvet Underground gone West.

Liminal is supposed to throw a rope between those two modes, acting as a kind of cosmic glue, or "dark matter music", as the pair have described it (they have said their work oscillates between songs and "non-songs" or "nongs" - although that might not catch on). That sense of grandeur is apparent on Ringing Ocean, its chimes and bleeps sounding like the final call of a doomed submersible, or Before Life's bioluminescent shimmer, tiny flashes briefly appearing in the formless thrum. Procession, meanwhile, operates more on the human scale, a little digital worksong that serves as a reminder of the days when technology - bottle-nosed phones, cherry-coloured laptops, even Eno's own Microsoft start-up chime - could still be cute and unthreatening.

Wolfe's lyrics are vague enough not to limit or block the space for feeling that she and Eno are keen to open up. There are hints of selves being remodelled and reshaped (the fuzzy atom-stream of Part Of Us), of afterlife euphoria (Flower Woman's lovely Cluster-like vibrations), of creeping mortality (the skeletal waltz of Shudder Like Crows), but the gap between inner-space and the outer limits is most successfully bridged on the time-lapse judder of Laundry Room. Wolfe narrates a Tindersticks-like story with such heavy intent that it becomes a metaphor for everything that can't be made right. "I've been waiting all night in the laundry room / For my clothes to dry," she says, sounding as if she's sunk deep in sleep paralysis, "but nothing seems to get dry in here." There's something unnerving in the mirror; a needless lie told to a lover; jarring references to supermarkets and snakes on a train: it's an enthralling bit of domestic noir, expertly locating the strange in the mundane.

Not every track here pushes open that portal so effectively and there are meanders and lulls. Yet for a record intended to reflect and connect Lateral and Luminal, Liminal stands up on its own, not so much a final destination as a buzzy, fluid crossing-pace for Eno and Wolfe's ideas.