Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

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Prog NOVEMBER 2025 - by Chris Roberts

BRIAN ENO & BEATIE WOLFE: LIMINAL

The third in the duo's triptych is a triumph.

Rightly or wrongly, many associate Brian Eno with minimalism. Yet there's nothing minimalist about releasing three albums in under six months, as he's done with the recent Lateral and Luminal.

The final work in the trilogy recorded with conceptual artist Beatie Wolfe (a very effective, understated singer) is a remarkable conjuring trick. Firstly it completes that trilogy, subtly referencing elements of the previous two works and casting them in a new light. But it has an individual soft power beyond this. Without ever doing anything so gauche as straining to be emotive, it somehow conveys all manner of emotions, and takes the listener to spellbinding, half- glimpsed, half-recognised places.

The pair have explained that if Lateral was "a sonic place" and Luminal was "a feeling space", Liminal is "a hybrid of the two, a strange new land". It is, they suggest, "set in the borderlands between song and non-song". And that can be felt, by the senses, as the pieces gently quiver and hint, like ghosts trying to wake you from everyday numbness. While there is, of course, that mastery of minimalism at play through many phases, it's astonishing how, for example, the opener, Part Of Us, trembles with passion. Structurally, materially, it bears no resemblance to a big heartstring-tugger like This Mortal Coil's version of Tim Buckley's Song To The Siren. However, its echoes of that glory are undeniable. It's something to do with feel, which can be transmitted through shy traces as much as through broad brushstrokes. Its use of negative space is stunning, and one wonders if anybody but Eno could pull off such sleight of hand.

Other tracks simmer, eager not to dance for attention but drawing one in through purity of focus. And others wilfully blur that focus, achieving the flickering warps of sound which My Bloody Valentine or Mogwai do, as a rule, with infinitely more volume. It's a trial not to describe this as space music, but if one thing's plain it's that it not only knows what to leave out, but how to make that created absence pulse with longing.

Ringing Ocean is perhaps a cousin of Michael Nyman and The Last To Know is on some level speaking via satellite to Eno's Apollo work, but these are glib, reductive comparisons. The tracks revel in being tactile, in tingling. While Procession ripples along as prettily as The Durutti Column and Flower Women hums with hypnotic Laurie Anderson-style vocal interjections from Wolfe, Liminal is always in its own space. It's a strangely warm, inviting one, for all its mysteries, and one to spend time bathing in.