Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe have teamed up for a pair of new albums, Luminal and Lateral. Out June 6, via Verve, the two records are born of a 2022 SXSW talk presented by the two, who had not met beforehand, called Art and Climate. They met again while exhibiting visual and conceptual art pieces in London and began sporadically recording together early last year. One song from each album, “Suddenly” and “Big Empty Country (Edit),” is out now; watch videos for both below.
In a press release, the pair wrote, “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.”
Eno and Wolfe go on to list some of those feelings, which include ilinx, in French, meaning “strange excitement from play,” mono no aware, in Japanese, meaning “appreciation of life’s transience,” and ya’aburnee, in Arabic, meaning “not wanting to live in a world without someone.”
Leave a Reply