Slow Stories is a collaboration between Bette A. and Brian Eno, combining storytelling, music, and painting.

For the Slow Stories record, Brian Eno’s ambient compositions cradle Bette’s voice as she tells two stories from her short story collection: ‘The Endless House’ and ‘The Other Village’.

The stories take place in imaginary towns and villages – places from pasts that never happened and futures that will never occur, but somehow point back at our world. These other worlds exist without much background or context, with Brian’s atmospheric music as the landscape that surrounds them.

Brian’s only instruction to Bette as they started recording was: “Slow, slower, even slower, yes, more slow.” Between sentences, there is sometimes half a minute of Brian’s music – space for the listener to create a mental landscape around the story developments, and become the third artist in the work. As the artists themselves note: “When everything is fast, fragmented and designed to grasp your attention, attuning to one very slow story can be a radical act. This record is a guided daydream, a space for rest and imagination.”

For both artists, slowness functions not only as a stylistic decision but as an act of resistance. Giving thirty minutes of your attention to something that is not urgent, not loud, and not passive, is rare. Putting on a record is a physical gesture to enter that mode,  engage with art and, maybe, your inner world.

The visual works accompanying Slow Stories extend this collaboration into a shared visual world. The paintings by Bette and Brian depict immersive, dreamlike terrains – birch forests with graffiti, lunar mountain ranges, floating eggs, geometric colour fields. Like the stories, the paintings leave room for the viewer to enter and make the work their own.

Slow Stories will be released exclusively by Unnamed Press,  as a limited edition of 444 bundles, each containing a hardcover book, a vinyl record, and a 20×20 cm unique and numbered hand-painted panel, signed by both artists. The artist’s proceeds of the sale of the bundle will go to their charities; The Heroines! Movement, a global storytelling movement around women role models, co-founded by Bette, and Earth Percent, a charity that channels funds from the music industry to organizations that do the most impactful work around the climate emergency, co-founded by Brian.

The project follows their 2024 book What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory (Faber).

The project will be announced for presale on Sunday, November 30, 2025, with bundles shipping ahead of the trade edition’s publication on March 3, 2026.