ES7129 seven-inch features Brian Eno & Beatie Wolfe
‘PLAY ON’
The A-side of our latest seven-inch is ‘Play On’, a track from Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe’s ‘Luminal’ album, which could be viewed as being about the nature of their collaboration itself. With its lightly strummed chords, gentle hi-hat rhythm and languid atmosphere, it’s a sort of half-awake manifesto, or at least a statement of chilled intent. “Play on, the night is young,” they softly sing.
“The track has a very unusual mood,” says Eno. “It’s really a combination of moods, of feelings, that I don’t think I’ve ever come across before. Is that what you’d say, Beatie?”
“Oh yeah, exactly,” responds Wolfe. “It’s a complex mixture of unlikely bedfellows – ecstasy and anger, torment and tenderness, the monstrous and the beautiful…”
“So much of the thrill of making music is finding these new feelings or new mixtures of feelings,” continues Eno. “That’s when it becomes something worth doing.”
”It’s also when you want to remain in the world that you’ve created,” says Wolfe. “You want to keep playing.”
You can hear the pair’s desire to surprise at the heart of the composition. “Stay close, stay near, we’ve just begun…” they offer, before adding “to run” just as they seem to have reached the natural end of the phrase.
And sure enough, right at the point you’re certain you know where ‘Play On’ is going, the gradual emerging of a tuneful electronic whine builds into an understated, wobbly, circuit-bent crescendo and a strangled otherworldly voice intones ‘Hold on!”. The result is both comforting and unsettling, a listening experience that feels simultaneously familiar yet strange.
“Sometimes we’ll be thinking, ‘Well, yeah, this is kind of quite regular what we’re doing now’,” explains Eno. “And then we’ll think, ‘So how about if we destabilise it by making it, say, a 10-bar cycle instead of an eight-bar cycle?’. So that means you head off in a different direction. It guarantees you won’t go to a lot of the places that music might normally visit.”
‘COMPROMISED COWBOY’
Deep bass tones and an ambient melodic presence introduce ‘Compromised Cowboy’ on the other side of our seven-inch. The metallic scratching and high keening notes of the track, which has previously only been available on the Japanese CD version of ‘Luminal’, create a widescreen, three-dimensional sense of space.
It’s another sonic paradox – sweetness with an underlying suggestion of foreboding in the soundscape.
“Inbuilt contradictions,” notes Eno. “It’s like it’s ominous but beautiful. Or something like that.”
“The best things in life are contradictory and rich,” says Wolfe.
So a brief lyric such as “Pick me up, buttercup” jumps out of the spacious void of ‘Compromised Cowboy’ with technicolour vividness.
“Most of the pieces began with us making a kind of landscape and then seeing if we could populate it with a voice,” says Eno.
“A new kind of cowboy,” declares Wolfe.
“Yep,” agrees Eno. “A cowboy that loves the cows and understands them and is on the same wavelength. We’ve been using the term ‘electric country dream music’, which is about the idea of open landscapes, and there’s a lot of that in this track.”
“I think with everything we’ve made so far, which exists across a wide spectrum, it’s been such an unconscious and intuitive process,” says Wolfe. “It starts with nothing and follows what we’re feeling at the time. So that’s why ‘dream music’ fits what we are doing, because so much of it was made in a dreamlike state.“
“Because of the way we work, we never start out with the thought, ‘Let’s write a song’, or ‘Let’s write a landscape’,” says Eno. “We just follow our noses like little piggies and see what happens.”
“And if a piece of music seems like it’s moving more into song territory – which is what ‘Luminal’ became a home for – the question is, ‘If this music could speak, what would it say?’,” expands Wolfe. ”That was the approach we took with the lyrics and the vocals.”
