Named after the opening piece from Brian Eno’s Ambient 4: On Land, the duo of The Lizard Point operates across geography as much as tone, split between Switzerland and San Francisco. That separation is embedded in the music itself: a quiet tension like signals traveling long distances and arriving slightly transformed.
The Lizard Point is the collaborative project of Conor Develin (AWMA, Caseworker) and Geoffrey Scott (Slowness), a duo that pares things down to piano and guitar in pursuit of something quietly transportive. Their instrumentals unfold with a restrained elegance, drifting between dusk-lit stillness and pastoral calm.
Their third album, In The Red Earth, which arrived on digital and vinyl March 10 via , continues that drift. Produced and mixed alongside Monte Vallier between Spillway Sound in upstate New York and Ruminator Audio in San Francisco, the record carries a kind of grounded expansiveness. It’s rooted in a sense of place, but never still.
Some of that may be because Conor and Geoffrey are so far apart geographically. Kind of like the duo met somewhere in the middle and translated their sound into a shared language.
In The Red Earth unfolds gently across thirteen tracks, none of which are particularly long. It makes the record feel more cohesive in one sense, as each track bleeds into the next for a singular auditory journey.
“Håkan’s Drift” moves like its name suggests: slow and deliberate, but also evocative. Inspired by Hernán Diaz’s novel In The Distance, it traces the liminal hours of a long drive — that strange, suspended state between dusk and dawn where time loosens.
There’s a cinematic quality to it, but not in the obvious sense. It’s less about scoring a scene and more about becoming one with the atmosphere around it — the soft buzzing sound of tires on asphalt, the dim glow of horizon light, the feeling of being caught somewhere in between destinations.
The accompanying video, directed by Cam Merton, leans into that same sense of transience, pairing the track with imagery that feels equally unanchored.
The title track brings a subtle rock feel to the record’s ambient nature. There are some drums – maybe electronic – and the electric guitar is a bit more lively, harkening back to the soft-focus haze of a dark and mysterious ’90s alt-rock band like Mazzy Star. The only thing I was disappointed about was that it didn’t stretch on a little longer, so I could take that journey further.
Another highlight is “Hawkshead: Winter, 1968-1969.” This is another track with literary influences, and it reminds me of something you’d hear on Eno’s Ambient 4. There are some disjointed audio clips that barely surface in the background, which gives it a very creepy, nocturnal vibe.
I also enjoyed “Terlingua,” which has a more pure ambient sound, the type that washes over you, especially on headphones. But even on this track, as the shifts in tone are subtle, there’s always a sense of motion, similar to the way many of Eno’s best ambient works were. Some ambient music, to me at least, sounds too monotone, but that’s not the case here.
Across In The Red Earth, The Lizard Point is less interested in building structures than in tracing contours, letting melody surface briefly before dissolving back into textures that splash across the surface and feel alive.
Brian Eno famously framed ambient music in the liner notes of Music for Airports (1978) as something that could exist in multiple states of attention.
“Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting,” Eno wrote.
On In The Red Earth, it feels more like the music is reshaping the background, and it’s doing it so imperceptibly that you hardly recognize the changes.
To support the release, the duo played a run of shows across the U.S. and Europe. One of those moments landed March 13th at Shapeshifters Cinema in Oakland, alongside Aux Meadows, a fitting pairing for music that thrives somewhere just outside of fixed coordinates.
In The Red Earth unfolds at its own pace, asking only that you meet it there. Turn it on and take the trip.
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