It Never Ends: Breaking Time with Brian Eno, Beatie Wolfe, and Solvej Balle

Literary and ambient time loops and the best nap of my life

I watch time slip away. Every day when I wake up, the counter starts ticking down. I look at my calendar and I see intervals of time. From the meetings and appointments, tasks for the day, to the deadlines and events coming up in the future. The morning routines, the drop-offs and pick-ups for school, the time to focus on being with my family, all leading up to getting my kid down for bedtime. Looking ahead to every Tuesday when I need to have this newsletter done before it comes out on Wednesday. In all of that, life is happening. I even started to look at music as intervals of time, glancing at album runtimes to consider how much time I have for it right now or if I should just listen to singles or forgo listening at all.

The time evaporates faster and faster. Most nights, I find myself staying up late just to try and squeeze a little more out of the day. A little time to catch my breath or unwind or work on projects, which of course only steal energy from everything I have to do the next day, but it’s a sacrifice I’m usually willing to make. And all this marked by witnessing my kid grow up right before my eyes, another mark of time passing faster and faster. I remember being a kid and feeling like time didn’t move fast enough. Now I’m begging for it to slow down.

All of this veers into cliche – time moves faster the older you get. But one thing I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older is that a lot of cliches and catchphrases about life end up being true. When I was young, I was bored all the time. Now I’d love a day to feel bored. And ultimately, for as hard and stressful as things can get, I think this desire for time to slow down comes from a love of life. Wanting to slow down and savor it, but also wanting to do more and more while I have time on this earth. It’s a conundrum that predates the existence of anyone reading this. For me, it manifests in stretching myself too thin and trying to take on too much (like, um, a weekly longform essay newsletter, for example).

This has had me thinking a lot about consumption too. Another Thought was born out of the idea of this need I feel to slow down, particularly with the feeling of always taking in more and more. To treat things less as “content” and more as individual works and ideas. It leads me to question myself if I’m consuming just to consume more or if I need to pump the brakes. Some of those late nights, I find myself just…sitting there. No energy to read, watch, listen, or “interact” with anything. Like my brain is overheating and it just needs to power down for a bit.

But sometimes this need to “consume” leads me to something spectacular. I often find myself doing multiple things at once, trying to save time, and it probably means I’m lessening the experience of one or both things. Then sometimes I land on a perfect pairing.

Recently, I picked up the first book in Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series. Fully knowing I have a stack of books in my “to-read this year” pile on my shelf, I definitely didn’t need to buy yet another thing. But with books and records, I’ve resigned that sometimes you’re just going to feel called to something and you need to trust that instinct. Or, put less poetically, sometimes a book just has a really cool cover and you can’t help yourself. “Judging a book by its cover” may be considered bad form, but I’ve found it to be an effective gateway into some cool stuff. A great cover implies to me that the author or publisher has some grand, intentional idea they want to convey. I feel the same way about album art too. Though in both cases, some really great works can have terrible artwork and vice versa.

I ended up reading On the Calculation of Volume I in a single day. Sneaking passages throughout the day while we hung out at home for a rare “lazy day,” then devouring the rest of the book after bedtime. I went to the bookstore the next day to pick up the second volume. It’s rare that I’m ever able to make time for a binge read unless we’re on vacation, even with a shorter book. But that’s really what the book is about: making time.

Balle’s book follows Tara Selter, a vintage book buyer who finds herself in some sort of time warp reliving the same day over and over again: November 18th. It’s very much a Groundhog Day scenario, but pushed to an extreme. While these two books are only the first to be translated into English, they’re part of a seven-book saga. While I don’t know where the series goes, at least these first two (I think it’s not a spoiler to say) all exist within that same repeating day. Where Groundhog Day expertly plays more like a morality tale, On the Calculation of Volume is an act of endurance.

I was worried the books would be tedious. Something that would sound cool in concept, but get really tired even within one book. But Balle’s writing is so wonderful, so approachable, and so engrossing that I breezed through both books. The concept is so ripe with ideas to explore, even on a single day. Tara is able to move about the world, keeping only some items on her person. The rules of the time loop evolve slightly as the books go on, though at this point, they haven’t given a lot of answers.

One thing is made immensely clear through Tara’s self-narration – living in the same day over and over again is some unique form of hell. In fact, I read another book earlier this year – Steven L. Peck’s A Short Stay In Hell – that drives the point of eternity being torture even further home. And while I acknowledged and accepted that fact, I couldn’t help but think how much I would get done if I were stuck in a time loop. Maybe (definitely) not indefinitely, but a couple years in a time loop would solve a lot of problems for me. No fear of missing big moments. Time to finish projects. And, of course, time to actually rest. One person’s hell is another person’s salvation. Again, I’m saying all this not actually knowing how the series will end. And I’m sure if I did suddenly find myself in a time loop, I wouldn’t be so jolly about it. But in theory, think of the time saved!

Around the time I started the second volume, I found myself listening to Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe’s latest album Lateral. The record is actually one half of a pair of albums that the two released, the other being Luminal. I’ve been describing the records as Eno and Wolfe’s answer to Nelly’s Sweat and Suit double album project from 2004.

I wasn’t familiar with Wolfe at all before this project, which is wild after I dug in and found out how brilliant of an artist she is. Luminal may be one of her more conventional works. She’s worked primarily in experimental spaces, creating works in augmented reality, releasing albums to be streamed from “the world’s quietest room” or connecting jackets and decks of cards with Near Field Communication (NFC) technology that plays her music when tapped with a phone. She’s thinking in dimensions that I can’t even quite comprehend.

Eno, I’m much more familiar with. I’ve spent so much time thinking about him over the past couple of years that it almost veers on feeling invasive. With all my research into ambient music, he ends up coming up again and again without fail. And even beyond his role in naming ambient music with Ambient 1: Music for Airports and all of his other ambient classics, he’s had in a role in some of the greatest rock records in history from David Bowie to Roxy Music and of course his solo works. It’s truly too much to list it all. I’ve come to really admire how Eno continually works forward and fosters new generations of artists. His work on Coldplay’s Viva La Vida elevated the band onto a different plane, he’s mentored Jon Hopkins and even put out a gorgeous ambient record with rising dance music star Fred Again…

I would say that Wolfe fits in this pattern with Eno working with up-and-comers, but this pairing feels more than that. Eno and Wolfe seem like kindred spirits. Innovators of different generations coming together.

The two albums are very different. Luminal centers Wolfe’s voice and songwriting. Her writing is abstract, but deeply contemplative. It has some really beautiful songs like the luminous “My Lovely Days,” the eerie “Milky Sleep,” and the jangly ramble of “Suddenly.” Of the two albums, it has the most physicality. Even still, the music is minimalistic. The duo says they recorded the bulk of both records with two guitars, one microphone, and “lots of software.” It’s almost like applying aspects of ambient music into pop songwriting.

Beattie is much more at the forefront of Luminal and there are moments where I assume I can tell who is doing what, imagining in my mind her singing and playing guitar, while also being able to identify, of course, Eno’s voice and the synth pad textures that waver about.

But I do find myself more drawn toward the other album in the pair, Lateral. Decidedly the more “ambient” of the two. Where on Luminal I felt like I could make guesses at who did what, on Lateral, I really couldn’t say. And it’s one of the things I love most about it. It feels like such a pure artistic blending. No telling where one ends and the other begins.

The album is really one long piece, broken up into eight tracks. A single song called “Big Empty Country.” Eno and Wolfe talked about the song’s origins in an interview with Birdy Magazine earlier this year. Both describe working on the albums, trying to create landscapes, and both mention the idea of a cowboys coming to mind, which deeply resonate given how much I’ve fixed on Eno’s quote about artists being farmers and cowboys this year. Eno describes the “cowboy” they had in mind as one who “loves the cows and understands them and feels on the same wavelength,” which feels like a perfect blending of both sides of the farmer and cowboy to me.

“Big Empty Country” was originally just one eight-minute-long track, and simultaneously, while Wolfe was in England and Eno was in California, they both separately had the epiphany that the song needed to be looped to become an hour long. Eno elaborates:

“I think people often find in music the world they would prefer to live in. Now if you are cynical, you can dismiss that as escapism, but I don’t think it’s escapism. I think it’s about trying to find the world that you would like to live in. It helps you to make that world, and that world in “Big Empty Country” is very real to me. It’s where I would like to live. It has breadth, it has possibility, it has change, and sometimes turbulence. It’s not sanitized. It has some wildness to it. So I think when you make music like that, when you make music that suggests a different world or invokes a different world, what you are really doing is saying to people, how about this as a future? What does that feel like to you?”

That idea resonates deeply with me and maybe explains part of why I’ve become so transfixed with Lateral and “Big Empty Country.” The piece is like living in one of Balle’s time loops, but in a form of heaven instead of hell. A world or timeline you don’t want to escape from. The music lingers on, delicate twang and reverb of guitars over low drones. The loops feel endless because, really, they are.

My family and I spent some time up in the Hood Canal here in Washington a couple of weeks ago. My wife’s side of the family has a tiny home out there, way far out in the woods and up a rocky dirt road. Driving up that hill feels like escaping further and further from work and the stresses of city life, even if I do love my city life. I never feel more at peace than when I’m surrounded by evergreen trees. My own big empty country. I brought Balle’s book and found myself playing Lateral quite often. A few times when I had the chance, I was able to steal away and take a nap. I put on my headphones and put on Lateral. Really, I don’t know if I’ve ever had better sleep in my life. One hour immersing myself and resting in the world of “Big Empty Country” felt like being transported far away, to a peaceful place where time moves at a slow and thoughtful pace. I got lost in my own time loop.

The churn of minutes, seconds, months, and years will continue forward. But it feels good to find something that makes it feel like you can escape the construct of time. Balle’s books are cautionary that changing the flow of time might not be all it’s cracked up to be. But Eno and Wolfe at least show that even in our unending march forward, art can make the impossible feel possible, making our worlds slow down.

Stray Thoughts

LISTENING: Laurie Torres - Après Coup / Laurie Torres & Nailah Hunter - “Correspondances II”

I’ve fallen quickly in love with Laurie Torres’ music. I find myself reaching toward her latest album, Après coup, almost absent-mindedly a lot lately. Based in Montreal, Torres makes lush and divine instrumental music with piano, synthesizers, and slight percussion. It feels like a soundtrack to a movie I’ve never seen, breezing from one moment to the next as scenes change effortlessly.

In the album’s description on Bandcamp, Torres says, “I had an urge to use creativity as a sort of resting place, a place where things can unfold slowly and take time to reveal themselves. In other worlds words, I felt the need to make something slower, more elusive.”

That call to slowness resonates with me deeply, as discussed in this week’s essay. Even in that feeling of slowing down, I still feel so much immediacy in her playing. At different times, it feels romantic, thoughtful, anxious, or curious. Even as I’m still gathering my thoughts about it, I find myself falling more in love with the record.

As a bonus, I was so excited to see she also recently collaborated with another one of my favorite artists, Nailah Hunter. Hunter’s ambient harp records, especially 2020’s Spells, have been in constant rotation for me in recent years. Her playing is transportive, truly feeling magical. “Correspondances II” is a reworking of one of Torres’ tracks from her 2024 EP of the same name. The pairing is truly wondrous: wide-eyed, hopeful, and just incredibly lovely.

LISTENING: Maxo - Mars Is Electric

When I first listened to L.A. rapper Maxo’s latest album, Mars Is Electric, I liked it but didn’t think it was something that would stick with me. But that changed just later the same day. I took a drive in my car, riding out at late sunset as the sky turned orange and cerulean, fading into night. For some reason, I felt like putting the record on. And suddenly, it just clicked. I ended up just looping the album, listening to it front-to-back again and again as the night darkness engulfed the sky.

It was a reminder to me that sometimes you just need the right setting to enjoy the music. My first listen was at my desk in the middle of the day. But the murky, hazy vibe of the record really came out in the slow burn fade of nighttime. Maxo’s voice swirls in a reverb fog, creeping and contorting against the dark, twilight beats. I’ve checked out some of his projects before, but on this record, it really feels like he’s tapped into something. It reminds me of artists like pink siifu and Liv.e, which I think is great company to keep. Give it a listen as the sun goes down, and I think it’ll really hit.

Like Brian Eno? Well, Do I Have a Book For You!

As you might expect, my upcoming book, 20th Century Ambient, goes deep into Brian Eno’s history with the genre. It’d be impossible not to! Eno’s role in developing the genre is massive. But I also dig into a slew of artists—from icons to unsung heroes—who shaped ambient music into what it is today.

“Through text and comics, 20th Century Ambient searches through ambient music's recent history to unearth how the genre has evolved and the role it plays in our daily lives.”

20th Century Ambient is out November 13, 2025 from Bloomsbury Books. Don’t miss your chance to reserve a copy now.

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