Luminal

Album review

When Brian Eno released his pioneering Ambient 1: Music for Airports back in 1978, the intention, he has said, was to "induce calm and a space to think." Going on five decades later, his latest works—Luminal and its instrumental companion, Lateral—have a different mission: "to trigger feelings, or feeling mixtures, that we've never quite felt before." He and collaborator Beatie Wolfe, an Anglo-American composer and experimental artist, tapped into feelings that can't necessarily be expressed with a single English word. There's commuovere, an Italian word that describes the experience of being emotionally moved; duende, which is Spanish for getting the shivers; pronoia, Greek for the opposite of paranoia; and merak, a Serbian term for being at one with the universe, to name a few. Luminal is a bit of an emotional rollercoaster, rather than an album you put on when you want to, say, strictly chill out. "Milky Sleep" is an apt title for the opener, though it's the weird, drifting slumber of being drugged—in this case, under the influence of Wolfe's slow and heavy vocal effects, mind-tugging slide guitar (performed by both artists) and the suggestion of a blackbird's crow. Things brighten up a bit with "Hopelessly At Ease," a confusing title—when is being at ease a negative?—for a tender lullaby that finds Wolfe's vocals coming out of the shadows and to the forefront, deep and rich. Over the course of Luminal, she's a bit of a vocal chameleon—balmy on idyllic, hymn-like "What We Are"; ominous on chilly "Never Was It Now," which unnerves with the acceleration and disappearance of machine noises zipping by; and able to reach a deep resonance on "Shhh," which features a low purr and the title word uttered like a breeze. That song, as well as the Enya-lite "And Live Again," may feel familiar to meditation-app users—in fact, Wolfe was the original content creator for the popular Calm app. Eno, meanwhile, is singing less and less these days (2022's FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE was the first time we'd heard his vocals on a full album in decades), and is simply back-up support here even as his fingerprints are all over the songs. He's in a country mood on lulling "My Lovely Days," which features a Carter Family-esque melody and a clear verse-chorus-bridge structure rather than ambient free-floating. "Suddenly," meanwhile, has the skeleton of a pop song—dreamed up by a man who has written or co-written some great ones. And both he and Wolfe play the omnichord here, creating a buzzing drone that feels like shorthand for the feeling that is "Eno-esque." © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz