Ambient trailblazing legend Brian Eno and art x science innovator Beatie Wolfe followed their feelings for their new pair of sonic creations: Luminal and Lateral. Luminal is Electric-Country-Dream-Music, an unexpected journey through myriad of emotions and soundscapes with Beatie exploring new vocal frontiers in synergy with Brian’s undeniable audio wizardry. Lateral is Ambient-Landscape-Space-Music, a continuous zero gravity theta level state of sound.
United by their mutual commitment to the intersection of art and the environment at their renowned 2022 SXSW talk, Art & Climate, their paths crossed again the following year in London. Beatie was exhibiting her brain installation imPRINTING at Somerset House while Brian was showing with light sculpturist Dan Flavin at Paul Stolper Gallery. Just like their encounters, their stars aligned for this musical collaboration when they found themselves organically writing and recording throughout 2024, with the albums taking shape in real-time.
As a result, Luminal and Lateral is a piece of art that serves as a home for feelings, ranging from the familiar to those never quite felt before to those we don’t even have the language to express. Audibly encompassed in a boundless dream world meets vast outer space, we’re reminded here that, like both expanses, our feelings, though full of the unknown, are ripe for exploration. We just have to dive in.
Brian and Beatie talk about feeling the feels in the making of Luminal and Lateral.
Brian Eno: With these records there wasn’t a single modus operandi. We didn’t think about a strategy or that we were making records. We just started playing and we enjoyed playing together so much. Like two kids who meet in the school yard and get on well.
Beatie Wolfe: And share each other’s toys.
Brian: Yeah, we didn’t have many toys. That was a big part of it. We did the whole three albums really on one microphone and one guitar and quite a bit of software, but not that much these days.
Beatie: I think with everything we’ve made, which is really across a very wide spectrum, we started out with nothing, with each layer then informing the next, wouldn’t you say?
Brian: Yeah, because of the way we work, we never start out with the thought, Let’s write a song, or let’s write a landscape or something like that. Instead we just follow our noses like little piggies and see what happens.
Beatie: When a piece of music did feel like it was in the song territory, which is what Luminal became a home for, the question was, “If this music could speak, what would it say?” That was kind of the approach with the voice and lyrics.
Brian: Yeah, making the feelings in the music a little bit more pointed. Sharpening up some of the feelings that are already there.
Beatie: And also seeing if it was possible to have a voice in this land without a personality to it.
Brian: Yeah. Most of the pieces I think started from us making a kind of landscape and then seeing if we could populate it with a voice
Beatie: A new kind of cowboy
Brian: Yep. A cowboy who loves the cows and understands them and feels on the same wavelength. Because Electric-Country-Dream-Music is about the idea of open landscapes (not people in middle America), and there’s a lot of that in this.
Beatie: “Big Empty Country”
Brian: It really has a feeling of openness and wideness …
Beatie: And aliveness
Brian: Yes. And not sweetness exactly. But I think I’d say it had a feeling of peace to it.
Beatie: Originally it was eight minutes long. I was actually back in California. Brian was somewhere deep in the heart of the English countryside and we had both, somehow, on the same day, looped the original eight minute piece eight times.
Brian: Oh yeah, that’s right.
Beatie: Thinking that it needed to be longer. We wrote to one another pretty much at the same time saying, “Hey, I think this could be extended to around an hour,” because it felt so good to listen to. So that was pretty synchronistic.
Brian: Yes. That was very interesting. I’d forgotten that. 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?
Beatie: A lot of this is really about feelings, familiar and foreign.
Brian: Yeah, like “Play On” is a very unusual mood because it’s really a combination of moods, of feelings, but it’s a combination I don’t think I’ve ever heard before. Is that what you’d say?
Beatie: Oh yeah, exactly. It’s a complex mixture of unlikely bedfellows … ecstasy and anger, passion and purity, the monstrous and the beautiful …
Brian: Yes, so much of the thrill of making music is finding new feelings, new mixtures of feelings. That’s when it feels like something worth doing.
Beatie: With all of this music there was no forethought about what was going to happen, but then as soon as these moods or landscapes or environments started to emerge and we’d realise, Oh, I really want to be here, it was about extending and expanding that. And especially when it was complex or ambiguous. Like your fascination with perfumery because of it containing so many complex notes that in theory shouldn’t go together. But actually that’s what makes it so intoxicating.
Luminal and Lateral are out on eco-friendly biovinyl, CD & digital download. LISTEN, WATCH, ORDER: HERE.
Brian Eno is a musician, producer, visual artist and activist who first came to international prominence in the early 70s as a founding member of British band, Roxy Music, followed by a series of solo albums and collaborations. His work as producer includes albums with Talking Heads, DEVO, U2, Laurie Anderson, James, Jane Siberry and Coldplay, while his long list of collaborations include recordings with David Bowie, Jon Hassell, Harold Budd, David Byrne, Grace Jones, his brother, Roger, on Mixing Colours and recently with Fred Again. In January 2024, Eno, a generative film about his life was screened at Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim. It was accompanied by a soundtrack release with new unreleased songs and classic Eno recordings spanning five decades.
Brian’s visual experiments with light and video continue to parallel his musical career, with exhibitions and installations all over the globe. He has exhibited extensively, as far afield as St. Petersburg’s Marble Palace, Ritan Park in Beijing, Arcos da Lapa in Rio de Janeiro and the sails of the Sydney Opera House. He is involved in multiple activist work, such as the climate charity EarthPercent and Hard Art, both of which he co-founded, as well as the Stop The War Coalition. He is a founding member of The Long Now Foundation, a trustee of Client Earth and patron of Videre Est Credere. In 2023, Brian was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement by the Venice Biennale Musica. He has recently written his second book, What Art Does co-authored with Bette A. and based upon his experience as an artist. Published by Faber, it was released in January 2025.
Check out Brian’s Website and follow him on Instagram for more.
Beatie Wolfe has recently held a solo exhibition of her design work at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, has been appointed a UN role model for innovation, and alongside Michael Stipe, was one of the artists on the world’s first bioplastic record, released by EarthPercent. Beatie was named by WIRED as one of “22 people changing the world” and is at the forefront of pioneering new formats that bridge the physical and digital. Her latest innovations include a visualization of 800,000 years of NASA’s CO2 data, which premiered at the Nobel Prize Summit; a brain installation which was exhibited at the London Design Biennale in Somerset House and is currently on show at the Museum of Science Boston, and a Big Oil x Methane project which won Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica. Other recent projects include the world’s first bioplastic record with Michael Stipe and EarthPercent, a collective mail art project with DEVO’S Mark Mothersbaugh and of course, a new body of work with Brian Eno. Beatie is also the co-founder of a groundbreaking research project looking at the power of music for dementia.
Check out Beatie’s Website and follow her on Instagram for more.
Head to our Explore section to see past interviews, features and contributions by Beatie Wolfe. Keep your eyes peeled for more by these talented artists.