Eliza Marshall – Eternal Birth (One World Records) album launch – Real World Studios – 14th January 2026

Report by Andy Hill, photos by Jason Sheldon.

IN THE BIG ROOM

On a January night in deepest Wiltshire, I find myself navigating boggy lanes in ludicrously thick fog, en route to a listening party for a record I’m a bit worried I won’t like. I’ve always harboured a faint, reflexive scepticism about world music. It can feel like a polite bucket for anything with a hand drum and someone solemnly intoning the word “journey”. Still, this is Real World Studios, Peter Gabriel’s storied hideaway, and the invite promises a Q&A, a full album playback with bespoke visuals, and a live set. Curiosity wins.

​The Big Room – an extraordinary modernist cavern that has hosted sessions by the likes of Amy Winehouse and Paul Simon, from Kanye to Kasabian – feels deliciously chic and exclusive: brushed concrete pillars, warm wood, tasteful lamps. Vast darkwood baffles dangle from the ceiling like hulking minimalist sculptures. Rare keyboard instruments are dotted around the room like art objects that would ruin your year if you knocked them over. I should be careful where I set my wine glass down, put it that way. A crowd gathers: writers, music people, the eminence grises of the biz.

​Onstage, Eliza Marshall – a flautist who’s worked with the likes of Paul McCartney and Florence + The Machine, and lent her considerable talent to film scores – introduces her new project with producer Graeme Pleeth and video artist Amelia Kosminsky. The mood is friendly, slightly nerve‑trembly. After years elevating other people’s visions, first with the collaborative Freedom To Roam project and now with this, she’s finally stepping out fully under her own name.

SENSE OF OCCASION

The same preoccupation with land, migration and how humans move through fragile ecosystems is still there, but folded into something more intimate and neo‑classical/world in tone – less campaigning, more quietly insistent, as if it’s asking you to notice what’s happening to the planet while you’re being swept along by the music. Peter Gabriel himself is in the audience, and the pre‑playback Q&A is steered by Radio 4’s Matthew Bannister, which only adds to the sense of occasion. The lights drop and a big screen, hung over the horseshoe‑shaped mixing desk, suddenly dominates the space.

The visuals arrive first as heat: sunset Serengeti tones, scorched earth, sacred trees in silhouette, yellows and oranges that sometimes whisper it could come across a wee bit Lion King. There’s a treetop drone view, rendering mighty centenarian trees as tender as broccoli florets. Sinuous root systems. Spidery mangroves. Tree rings. Shoals of fish. Swirling starscapes. Smiling faces. It’s not a narrative so much as a fever dream of ecology: underground and sky, human and nonhuman, the whole mad cycle of life looping back on itself.

LEAD STORYTELLER

Musically, Marshall’s flute plays lead storyteller – sometimes spare and breathy, sometimes brisk and acrobatic. There’s sibilant spoken word, too. She says she isn’t a singer, so the voice lands more like incantation than chorus – occasionally profound, occasionally a wee bit fridge‑magnet. “Arise. Sunrise.” But when the groove hits, it works like a charm. The body knows what it likes. Track by track, the sonic palette broadens: cascading piano, luscious percussion flourishes, moments where what could have been generic ‘world music’ instead lands somewhere between neo‑classical soundtrack and restless folk‑rooted globalism, less ‘genre’ and more universal, cinematic.

​The third track is where the room visibly loosens. Heads start nodding among the assembled. It has colour, humour, a gamelan‑ish percussive character that lifts the whole space. The visuals respond with arms entwined, hands clasping, fingers touching – connection made literal.

At the interval, we all queue at a trestle table for a generous spread of food from the pre‑gig welcome reception – properly delicious and swiftly demolished – with Kettle Chips as an extra snack on the side. The wine and prosecco, meanwhile, are carefully chosen organic Wild Thing bottles, picked to echo Marshall’s own ethical leanings and her Freedom To Roam project; tonight’s event is also raising money for the Born Free Foundation and Trees For Hope. Yes, even the bar is on‑message.

LIVE SET

After the playback, Marshall returns for a live set on tin whistle, her unusual U‑bend flute, plus violin and percussion. The percussionist, Ady Thione from Senegal – with whom she recorded part of the album on his home turf, the rest at Real World – brings a rich rhythmic elasticity that makes the tracks feel newly alive. Beside him, Swedish violinist Lena Jonsson, who also appears on the album, braids nimble lines around Marshall’s melodies. The tunes are braided tight, athletic and joyful, and the room rises for a warm standing ovation. As debut solo album launch moments go, it’s a quietly huge first step out on her own.

Driving home, fog closing in again, I’m struck by how much of the album (our review) has unexpectedly lodged itself in my head, in spite of my earlier scepticism. Despite the odd drift into early-noughties coffeeshop cliche, Eternal Birth is authentically, invigoratingly alive. And it’s fair to say I’m transported by those pirouetting flute lines, and visuals of tender green shoots dancing and writhing against all reason out of a parched and broken earth.

Eliza Marshall: Website 

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