Today, Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe share their collaborative albums, Luminal and Lateral via Verve Records.
Eno and Wolfe first met through their environmental work when they gave a SXSW featured talk on ‘Art and Climate’. The talk was recently selected as one of the festival’s best in 25 years.
The pair then met again when they were each showing their visual and conceptual art pieces at separate galleries in London. Their musical collaboration grew out of those meetings.
Commenting on the new single Eno says “In Play On the piece took us somewhere unusual, a place where some quite incompatible feelings became restless bedfellows - there’s anger and ecstasy, some kind of desperation mixed with some kind of force - and some kind of joy. Is there a word for that mixed feeling? Even if there isn’t, there’s now a piece of music for it.”
Reflecting on their collaboration on this project, which was recorded sporadically by the pair through 2024, Brian and Beatie said:
“Music is about making feelings happen. Some of those feelings are familiar, while others may not be – or may be complex mixtures of several different feelings. There are many beautiful words for such feelings in other languages and cultures - words that don’t exist in English. By giving a feeling a name, we make that feeling more likely to be felt, more tangible. Art is able to trigger feelings, or feeling mixtures, that we’ve never quite felt before. In this way, a piece of Art can become the ‘mother’ for a type of feeling, and a place you can go to find and re-experience that feeling. Some of the feelings we found ourselves working with were these...