Liminal - Brian Eno & Beatie Wolfe

By Lola Nam de Giorgio

In Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe’s newest collaboration Liminal, the duo attempts to make sense of the in-between, blending Wolfe’s gentle timbre with a lush soundscape of the outside world. Eno is by no means a novice, having experimented for the last half a decade with synthesisers, tape loops, and playing around with reverb – and perhaps this is why his effortless ability in creating such detailed projections through his music pairs so well with the eerie quality of Wolfe’s voice and her own contributions as a producer on this album. This combination of the ethereal and the spasms of the everyday world creates a dizzying listening experience that I can truly only describe as ghostly and spectral.

In a statement earlier this year, Eno and Wolfe described their newest work as “a strange new land with a human living and feeling its way through its mysterious spaces.” This sentiment is certainly carried through the album from tracks like ‘The Last To Know’ and ‘Flower Women’, with the presence of the human trying to make sense of the natural world around them. Wolfe’s voice shuttles through the album, making these grand and equally blunt comments about the quality of the world around her: “And so we go, too fast, too slow to count the ways we die inside.” It feels as though the speaker is equally at the beginning and the very end point of life —  between knowing and not knowing. Coupled with the concept of the “nong” (song and non-song), the tracks sound like excerpts from the centre of the forest with the spoken-word, lullaby tune that Wolfe employs. All of this creates a feeling of an echo trapped rather than a song off a track of an album.

The penultimate song on the album, ‘Laundry Room’, seems to bring everything back into the present. Unlocked out of the transient, ethereal world of Liminal, Wolfe harps about the nagging ache of not being able to let things go, of being in a laundry room where she “can’t get those clothes to dry,” and so the very function of the place defeats itself. This mundane metaphor captures the essence of how we straddle the in-between space between reality and our internal thoughts – how the unsaid festers and infiltrates the landscape, how our intimate thoughts we keep expel themselves into our surroundings. What makes this album so interesting though, is its familiarity. The textural soundscape created feels at odds with the presence of Wolfe’s voice at times, like the presence of human life in the vast abundant wilderness.

This is not by any means an easy listening album. At times, the lyrics clash with the ambient, otherworldly chime of the Liminal’s soundscape, yet when listening to it in tandem with the pair’s other projects Luminal and Lateral, it is interesting to see the shift from the cosmic to the worldly, charging more into the realm of what we know, what we can see and experience, but cannot make sense of. Because, at its core, Liminal is the unknown space we find ourselves in, the shift between the reachable and the unattainable.