Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

The Wire NOVEMBER 2025 - by Leah Kardoss

BRIAN ENO & BEATIE WOLFE: LIMINAL

After the twin missives of Lateral and Luminal earlier this year, Liminal sees recently prolific collaborators Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe exploring vaguer territories. These half-asleep compositions inhabit the porous spaces between songform and atmosphere, the result being a remarkably relaxed album that is perhaps the strongest of the trilogy.

On Part Of Us Eno and Wolfe's voices are braided together in languid unison over a fragile, softly grinding ambience. Questions of freedom and mortality are murmured in cadences recalling David Lynch and Chrystabell's Cellophane Memories, like a dream dissolving as it's being sung. The Last To Know is a poetic sketch that carries the elegiac quality of Eno's last solo LP FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE, while Procession spins minimalist guitar loops into buoyant whorls of sound. Corona shimmers with radiant calm, like sunlight through closed eyes on a cold day.

Often pushed into dry, close-miked focus, Wolfe's voice gives tracks such as Little Boy and Shallow Form a sense of proximity that borders on uncomfortable. Elsewhere, voices bend into strange shapes through pitch correction, vocoder choirs and digital harmonic effects. This use of voice as texture rather than anchor strengthens the album's sense of in-betweenness. Flower Women leans into that ambiguity, layering vocoder drones and sampled voices into something futuristic, at the same time recalling the eccentricity of early Eno compositions like Little Fishes and Discreet Music. Over the lazy, scratchy blues of Laundry Room Wolfe murmurs in lo-fi about a room where "nothing seems to get dry" while Eno's space age sweeps and bright electronic pings push the mundane vignette into the surreal.

Occasionally the album hints at something dark, the meditative new age ambience of Before Life for instance softly troubled by mid-range dissonances and vague, rumbling unease. The heavy and opaque final track Shudder Like Crows is the only minor key composition - twisting a hypnotic coil into dense earth, appropriately leaving the listener in a state of atmospheric limbo.