Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe talk Oblique Strategies and why “there’s a terrible housewifely tidiness presented with music”

Brian Eno and his latest collaborator Beatie Wolfe have spoken about their Korean karaoke meeting, bonding over a hatred of NFTs and the fun they had making their forthcoming two-album release ‘Luminal’ and ‘Lateral’.

At a playback and Q&A session held in Eno’s West London studio last night (Wednesday June 4), surrounded by Eno’s tone-shifting light paintings, he and Wolfe – a conceptual artist and composer best known for striking environmental protest pieces such as ‘Green To Re’d and for beaming her 2017 album ‘Raw Space’ into space – described the making of the albums as “constantly fun”.

The albums, both released tomorrow, represent different strands of their collaboration, with ‘Luminal’ consisting of spacious, country-inflected songs sung by Wolfe with Eno on backing vocals, and ‘Lateral’ made up of an eight-minute ambient track ‘Big Empty Country’ looped and regenerated eight times.

“Pretty much exactly on the same day, Brian was on the train and I was walking in [LA’s] Griffith Park, and we both looped it eight times and then wrote to each other, saying, ‘oh, it should be around an hour’,” Wolfe said.

“It was so synchronistic, it was so bizarre. It just felt like it needed more time and space.”

Eno added: “I kept playing it and getting to the end of eight minutes and thinking I just want to hear it again, so then I stuck several of them together, and it was a generative piece so actually I regenerated, only for digital.”

Speaking to GQ writer Grayson Haver Currin, the pair explained how they first met in 2022 at a Korean karaoke bar.

“Brian was doing ‘Only You’,” said Wolfe. “He was really good.” With Wolfe based in LA, they began communicating via Zoom. “We bonded over a hatred of NFTs,” Wolfe said, “This was right as they were on the scene, and we were both getting emails from different people saying ‘you should be one of the first to do something interesting with this’. And we just thought it was drinking the Kool Aid.”

Later that year the pair held a talk on art’s relationship to the climate emergency at SXSW and began collaborating on music in Eno’s studio. “He started Playbox, which is this Native Instrument piece of software, we were just playing around with it and it was really fun,” Wolfe said. “And there was a ukulele – it was pretty experimental. There weren’t really any other instruments in there, just this out-of-tune ukulele. From there it only got better.”

According to Wolfe, the music they created fell into two categories: songs and “non-songs, which we called ‘nongs’”.

‘Luminal’ was created with only one instrument – a 40-year-old guitar which had only had its strings changed once. “This was the most spartan lineup of instruments,” Eno explained. “It’s just the two of us with one electric guitar. We added another one right at the end…Part of the idea of this is, let’s just go into a studio, two of us and make something with what’s there. We just thought, whatever is there, whatever’s possible for us, we’ll just make something with that. And that remained the principle.

“Every day is a new day and we’ll do something today that we wouldn’t have done yesterday or tomorrow.”

Wolfe went on: “Coming into Brian’s studio and having a humming guitar that had been restrung once, I loved that, because you’re taking all the ego out of it. You’re just getting back to simplicity and economy.”

The pair also used Eno’s famous Oblique Strategies cards during their sessions – a series of challenging constraints and instruction intended to help artists break writer’s block by encouraging lateral thinking, as used during the making of David Bowie‘s Berlin trilogy.

“We would each pull one and then not reveal to the other person what the card said,” Eno said. “So we would then operate under whatever restrictions or freedoms the card gave us, and try to bend the session so it made our card work, and it produced some interesting results.

“If she has a card that says, for example, ‘destroy everything’, and I have a card that says, ‘change nothing and continue with immaculate consistency’, then you’ve got two people who are working at cross purposes, which sometimes produces good results. What we tried to do was to set it up so the game was always interesting, so it never became another day in the studio. We tried to make it so that every day was a thrill, and it was, pretty much.”

Eno described his to writing on this project approach as feeling-based. “You’d think that the first question people ask themselves when they’re making pieces of music in studios would be, ‘am I getting any feeling from this?’ But funnily enough, a lot of people don’t,” he said.

“They just go through the mechanics of doing something that sort of seems like music. 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 routine, in a way. If we weren’t getting a feeling from something, we moved on or we changed it in some way.”

He added: “I wanted always to be having feelings about it, and strong feelings if possible, new feelings, new mixtures of feelings. That’s always what interests me, when something is pretty but ominous or awkward and loving, those kinds of mixtures which you can make in music and in painting and so on.”

He also eschewed technical perfection, revealing that “an element that’s always been important to me is emptiness, of deliberately leaving a thing so there’s space to imagine moving around within it, not filling it up”.

“I don’t like fiddling anymore,” he admitted. “I can hear fiddling – it makes me nervous. When I listen to recordings that have a sense of slight carelessness, I prefer them, when it hasn’t been tidied up…

“There’s a terrible sort of housewifely tidiness presented with music, because 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.”

‘Luminal’ and ‘Lateral’ are set for release on June 6 via Verve Records.

Eno recently made headlines for joining Massive Attack in signing an open letter to Field Day urging them to distance themselves from global investment firm KKR in solidarity with Palestine, before joining Kneecap’s campaign for “freedom of expression” as the Irish rap trio face terror charges amidst their stance on Gaza. The icon also urged Microsoft to cut ties with Israel, in which he also pledged to donate his fee from the Windows 95 chime he composed for them to aid for Palestine.

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