Beatie Wolfe Talks About Working With Brian Eno On Their Two Collaborative Albums

Forbes

6 hours ago

(L-R) Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe
Beatie Wolfe, the Anglo-American conceptual artist and musician, says she never really considered that the recordings she made with the legendary Brian Eno in his studio — born out of the spirit of creativity — would lead to their official commercial release.
'It's been this incredible, creative kind of volcano,' Wolfe says of working with the British music pioneer. 'And it's been so joyful and so much fun that I was really doing it for that reason. I was doing it because it felt so good to make the work. That was very much a shared feeling. It was Brian who really said, 'Hey, we should be releasing this stuff. This is so great.' At that point, I thought, 'Yeah, okay. Why not?' But it's been interesting because part of me has always felt it's our music. Sharing it with people is wonderful because you see [them] really connecting with it.'
Earlier this month, the two experimental artists released a pair of minimalist and exquisitely beautiful-sounding collaborative albums: Luminal, which features vocals and lyrics, and Lateral, an instrumental ambient work. Wolfe says the music organically developed without much forethought or conscious effort.
'There were pieces that were becoming more identifiably songs,' she says. 'And then there were pieces that we called 'nongs' — non-songs. Then there were pieces that were sort of long nongs. And then there were these other ones in between that were kind of textural or sort of drone, more on the verge of soundtracks, odd kind of sound design stuff. It was a whole spectrum, and we weren't really favoring any one avenue. We were just allowing everything to be created as it was interesting to us.'
The creative relationship between Eno and Wolfe began when they first met virtually in late 2021 to discuss each other's environmental work. Their shared connection about the environment and the power of art and music led Eno and Wolfe to deliver a talk at South by Southwest in 2022 — with Eno delivering his remarks virtually and Wolfe appearing onstage at the event.
(L-R) Beatie Wolfe and Brian Eno.
But it was in 2023 that the two finally met in person as they were having exhibitions of their works displayed at separate galleries in London. 'We went to one another's shows,' Wolfe says, 'and obviously so enjoying one another's conceptual artwork, realizing, 'Oh, wait, we have all of this in common as well.' It was following those two shows that I was at his studio.
'So we were having a really lovely Sunday with no plans to make anything. Then he said, 'Hey, let me show you something I've discovered that I've been enjoying using.' We went into the studio, and he got out his Playbox native instruments. Then we ended up making two pieces just very spontaneously. There were no real instruments. There was maybe the Omnichord, but there weren't really any guitars. There was just a single out-of-tune ukulele. So I was playing that along with this Playbox kind of bed. And I would say the music definitely only got better from there, but it was a very good start.'
'It was almost like I could feel, even from that first meeting, that first taste or the first dipping your toe into this expansive ocean of what we could make together because it was so easy and it was so fun and un-self-conscious…It felt like I was with my best friend from childhood and we were making up plays or pretending to be ninjas.'
The instrumental album Lateral consists of eight tracks each titled 'Big Empty Country.' It was born from one of the duo's landscape pieces that conjured up a land that they wanted to be in.
'We'd both surprisingly listen to the original piece, which was only eight minutes long, on the same day, with me in L.A. and Brian in the U.K.,' Wolfe recalls. 'We ended up looping it eight times because we just wanted to stay in that world. Then Brian sent me an email saying, 'Hey, I'm just completely transfixed by 'Big Empty Country.' I've been listening to it on this train going through the English countryside. I think it should be around an hour long.' And I said, 'Brian, this is so weird because I did exactly the same thing walking in Griffith Park in L.A. for a walk and I just kept looping this original eight-minute version.' So things like that would happen very naturally, then the kind of final version of the record started forming.'
Featuring vocals and lyrics, Luminal worked along similar lines as Lateral in evoking a desire to be in a particular place. Wolfe says: 'With Luminal, it was just choosing [material] that had that nice variety of these strange moods, these dreamy moods, with some of them being sweeter than others. Similarly, there was a mixture of feelings. Both of us love these complicated feelings. Things that are sweet and sour, edgy and beautiful, and painful and passionate.'
Cases in point of how Lumimal conveys different moods are the whimsical and poppy 'Sunny' and the dissonant and haunting 'Never It Was Now.'
''Never Was It Now' — that was a great example of something that began with this sound atmosphere where Brian had found an amazing sound for the guitar. Everything that 'Never Was It Now' is was an improvisation, really, in terms of the music. And then it was, 'Okay, where are we?' We're in this almost like a post-apocalyptic world or L.A. after the fires. There are the helicopters and everything is dark and ominous and you're at the edge of humanity or something.'
'I lost my father a year ago,' she adds, 'and there are references within both of those songs to him, even though they're so different, because 'Suddenly' was written sort of right before he died. But then there are some lines that reference what was going on. And so even though ['Suddenly'] is this sweet, beautiful kind of very whimsical pop song, I still think it contains something of even a subtle little edge within it. Obviously, 'Never Was It Now,' you go fully into that dark space."
Not just in the music, but the chemistry between Wolfe and Eno is quite evident in their blended vocals, especially on the dream pop track 'Play On' from Luminal. 'Particularly in music, if you're often in a band situation, everyone wants themselves to be the biggest part,' says Wolfe. 'With Brian and me, it's the opposite. It was often me saying [to Brian], 'Please sing this with me because I love your voice,' and 'Let's have more of your voice in here.' And he's like, 'Oh, my God. I don't want to ruin it by adding me to it because this is so beautiful.' It's so nice because it's the opposite of so many situations where you're sort of elbowing one another out of the way.'
Wolfe admits that she didn't grow up as an Eno fan; as a teenager, she loved the music of David Bowie, the Rolling Stones and Leonard Cohen. 'I think I'd always just liked people's work as opposed to getting into who they were," she explains. "I somehow really specifically didn't listen to any of his music. I don't know why. I was listening to a lot of American music, actually, and I was at times living in the States.'
She adds: 'What would happen is when I would do these other projects that were the core of my work — with rebooting experiments and technology for Bell Labs or doing these space broadcasts or climate visualizations, all these kind of weird and wonderful thing — I would often get people saying, 'Oh, you and Brian must know each other' or 'You two must have worked together. There's such an interesting alignment between what you guys are doing.''
(L-R) Beatie Wolfe and Brian Eno
Luminal and Lateral don't appear to be one-offs from the duo but rather teasers of what's to come; Wolfe says she and Eno have recorded nearly 400 pieces of music together. It's clear from the way Wolfe talks about working with Eno that she found a kindred musical spirit.
'I feel very, very blessed because it's just a joy, and it's so easy,' Wolfe says. 'It's like the gift that keeps giving. You think, 'Wow, we've spent how many hundreds of hours together making things. Wouldn't we get bored?' If something isn't interesting to us, we just can't keep doing it. I'm amazed by how compelling it is to make what we're making. The number of times we've played something back, and it's almost as if we made it in a dream because we're thinking, 'When did we make that and how did we make that? And is that just the two of us? How did that happen?''