BRIAN ENO - Luminal / Lateral

With an archive of demos and unreleased material exceeding ten thousand pieces, Brian Eno confirms himself as a brilliant anomaly on the music scene. A self-described non-musician, the ingenious English composer and producer has turned contemporary art inside out, with artistic statements that have pushed rock towards the future with a language all of its own.

With the eleven compositions pulled out of the magic hat and included on the recent album "Aurum", Eno has breathed new life into the concept of generative music, taking on the vocabulary of artificial intelligence to explore its real possibilities. A project available only digitally via Apple Music, which, while adding nothing new to the English musician's already well-known ambient output, has brought back into focus a notion of creativity in which the human being still plays the leading role.

This is also the context for the two albums made with Anglo-American musician and conceptual artist Beatie Wolfe, "Luminal" and "Lateral", both fertile ground for theories halfway between technology and science, through which Wolfe studies the therapeutic value of music on cognitive decline such as dementia and Alzheimer's.

Two quite different records, whose complementarity has more to do with a spatio-temporal dimension than with any deep creative synergy. Wolfe's presence on "Lateral" is barely perceptible (in truth, besides synths, the artist plays all the guitar parts), as the album is an evolution of the alchemical strategies of a work like "Discreet Music", reworked through the conceptual filter of generative music, resulting in a rather amiable ambient record, even though the eight compositions appear identical both in structure and duration (with only a few seconds' variation around the eight-minute mark for each track).

What sets apart the other chapter, "Luminal", is the presence of vocals which, while adding harmonic and lyrical variables, still remain suited to a relaxing, ambient sound. In its apparent ordinariness, "Luminal" reveals a series of nuances and insights that gradually take on a far more powerful and subversive quality: there's no need to wait for "And Live Again" to potentially be used in some film project to appreciate its intense romanticism and melodic candor, nor does the splendid foray into psychedelia and blues of "My Lovely Day" require any striking adjectives.

More than songs/compositions, these eleven tracks are epiphanies, whether it's a stark, ascetic cosmic-ambient-pop in the vein of Julee Cruise ("Milky Sleep", "Shhh"), or a compelling dream-pop piece with the typical trappings of post-Roxy Music Brian Eno ("Hopelessly At Ease"), it's clear that "Luminal" is the fruit of a remarkable creative synergy.

The music of Eno and Wolfe belongs to the world of dreams, drawing life force from it for ballads set to cadenced waltz and country rhythms ("Play On"), capturing that folk-pop magic that grants immortality to contemporary music (the infectious "Suddenly"), but above all reaffirming just how much the English composer has influenced a generation of musicians ranging from Spacemen 3 to Beach House.

The final compositions display a more experimental and abstract streak: the tracks' more unsettled, darker tone is at times intense ("A Ceiling And A Lifeboat"), at times soothing and restrained ("Breath March"), at times almost corrosive ("Never Was It Now"), paving the way for the healing, confident finale of "What We Are", another gem among the oblique strategies that the English musician and producer has dispensed throughout his noble, long career.

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03/07/2025