Inside the music: Eliza Marshall’s Eternal Birth in Dolby Atmos at Tileyard Gallery – 1st September 2026

London’s Tileyard Gallery saw a listening evening which turned an album about ancestry, nature and cross-cultural exchange into an enveloping, communal experience of sound.

EXPEREINCES, ENCOUNTERS AND QUESTIONS

Before a note of Eternal Birth filled The Gallery at Tileyard, Eliza Marshall sat down with broadcaster and Guardian world music writer Robin Denselow and DJ and international showcase producer Almass Badat to talk about the experiences, encounters and questions from which the album had grown.

It wasn’t really an interview. The conversation moved in all three directions. Denselow asked Marshall about the African rhythms that had fascinated her since she studied them at sixteen. Badat explored what can happen when artists step outside the roles conventionally assigned to them. Marshall was just as curious about the lives and work of the two people sitting alongside her, and continually turned the questions back towards them.

BEGINNINGS

She traced the beginnings of the album partly to the isolation of Covid, when a loop pedal allowed her to start layering sound alone. But the record grew once other musicians entered it. In Dakar, she worked with musicians including Senegalese percussionist Ady Thioune. French was their limited shared language, Wolof was spoken around her and there was no shared score to fall back on. Eliza arrived with structures in mind, and the music developed through listening and response.

Asked what it was about African music that had entered her own work so powerfully, Eliza returned to that idea of layering. She recalled walking into a room of 25 percussionists in Senegal and being met by a thunderous wall of sound: intricate, alive and held together by each musician’s understanding of the whole.

3D LISTENING

Those layers would become important later in the evening. When asked what it meant to mix the album in Dolby Atmos, Marshall wisely avoided a technical lecture. “It’s essentially 3D listening,” she said. “You’re stretching it out and placing the music all the way around people, rather than it just coming from a stereo.”

It sounded like the right home for a record already built from loops, interlocking rhythms and musicians responding to one another across cultures.

Marshall then turned the conversation back towards Denselow, asking how his years reporting from different parts of Africa had shaped his relationship with its music. He described first discovering African music through the radio while living in Burundi. Later, while making a film about Baaba Maal, he followed the musician across the Senegal River into Mauritania without the visas his BBC crew expected to need – he told us of the resulting hair-raising adventure.

For Denselow, music had revealed another side of the places from which he was reporting. Alongside the wars and political violence were deep cultures, histories and connections which did not necessarily respect the borders drawn on a map.

Badat brought the theme of travel and learning about different cultures into the present. If she had understood America only through British news reports, she said, she would have been left with a one-dimensional picture. Travelling, sitting in bars and talking to strangers had offered something more truthful.

Musical connections do more than contradict the reporting of what is happening, she suggested. “They are the actual thing that is happening.” People are creating, conversing through instruments, sound and movement, and finding ways to stand together by making something together.

BLOODLINES

Marshall recognised the same energy in her work with Ady Thioune, with whom she toured England in 2025, before the album’s release. With little shared language beyond Marshall’s French, and with Thioune apparently inclined to talk as energetically as he played, the tour had been exhausting as well as exhilarating. That energy between musicians had transferred into the music.

The conversation eventually returned to another of the album’s central concerns: our relationship with the natural world.

Marshall spoke about bloodlines, parenthood and what we leave behind, whether or not we have children. Thomas Hardy’s poem Transformations helped her find the album’s title, with its image of human life continuing through the earth and natural world. Suzanne Simard’s Finding The Mother Tree offered another image: trees which may appear solitary above ground but are connected beneath it through roots and mycelial networks. The two parts of Lonely Oak carry that image into the record. Other titles, including Roots Entwined, Dust To Dust and Interconnected, give a sense of the territory Marshall is exploring.

By the end of the conversation, we had been given a way into Eternal Birth. This was music concerned with connection across time and geography: ancestry and the living body, musicians and traditions, solitude and community, and the life continuing beneath what we can see. Marshall thanked the people who had helped bring the album into being, including producer Graeme Pleeth, before asking us to leave the room briefly while the stage was rearranged.

BE HYPNOTISED

When we returned, The Gallery no longer felt like an events space. Black curtains enclosed the audience. One final speaker had been moved into position. The lights went out. Phones were switched off, not merely silenced. Marshall gave us permission to close our eyes and then offered one final instruction: “Turn your phones off and just be hypnotised.”

Public album playbacks can be oddly exposed affairs. The artist sits among the listeners while a finished record is sent out into the room, and everyone wonders how visibly they ought to respond. This felt different. The conversation had already drawn us into the album’s world. Now we were being asked to stop talking and enter it fully.

Flutes and bansuri, balafon, electronics, kora, percussion, strings, guitar, spoken word and voice are layered with considerable care throughout Eternal Birth. West African rhythmic intensity meets the clearer, more open tone Marshall associates with Irish traditional instruments.

ACCIDENTALLY CINEMATIC

Marshall had described the album as “accidentally cinematic”, and in Atmos it was easy to understand what she meant. Its scale comes from the number of musical relationships it allows us to hear.

Instead of receiving a stereo image from two speakers in front of us, we occupied the same field as the music. Percussion became part of the environment rather than something happening in the background. Flute, strings, electronics and voice emerged as individual presences within the whole. At times I followed one sound, let it go and found another arriving from somewhere else in the room. It was immersive, but we weren’t lost inside it.

Afterwards, one listener said it had felt like live music in the way live music ought to feel, and like sitting around a campfire. The music had not been presented in a line, projected towards us from a stage. It seemed to exist around and among us.

SOPHISTICATED CONTEMPORARY TECHNOLOGY

The evening became far more than a demonstration of a new audio format. The technology mattered, but so did the act of powering down our phones, the black curtains, the darkness and the decision to hear the album in its entirety. Everyone in the room had accepted the same invitation. For that hour, listening was something we were doing together.

What stayed with me was the way the form of the evening echoed the subject of the album. We had heard Marshall talk about roots, bloodlines, musical exchange and the often invisible connections between living things. We then sat together inside a mix which made those connections audible.

There was something rather beautiful about sophisticated contemporary technology returning us to a much older social shape: people gathered in a circle, listening together – The Dolby Atmos remixes allowed us to step right inside Eternal Birth.

Eternal Birth: Original release 16th January 2026. Remixed in Dolby Atmos August 2026.

Eliza Marshall – Touring solo with Eternal Birth this Autumn:

LIVE SOLO GIGS & WORKSHOPS
4 October | Surrey Dorking Flutes workshop
8 October | Totnes The Barrel House
9 October | London Tuned In London
10 October | Hampshire Hampshire Flute Society workshop
11 October | Hay-on-Wye The Globe at Hay
17 October | Swannington Elm Farm Music
18 October | Leamington Spa Temperance 

And looking ahead: 14 January 2027 | Bury The Met 

Tickets on sale now: https://elizamarshall.com/#live

Words: Katie Whitehouse

Photography: Jason Sheldon / York Tillyer

Eliza Marshall: Website 

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