Pop Culture
Artists Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe Team Up for a Sonic Dive Into ‘Feelings’
The pair are dropping twin collaborative records "Lateral" and "Luminal."
Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe. Photo: Cecily Eno.
by Min ChenMay 16, 2025 Share This Article
Three years after they first crossed paths, artists Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe have teamed up for a music project that mines their shared vision—and feelings—for art.
On June 6, Eno and Wolfe will drop Lateral and Luminal, collaborative albums they recorded intermittently over 2024. According to press notes, the former record, led by Eno, is “Space music,” while the latter, headed by Wolfe, is “Dream music.”
Two early singles bear out these distinct moods. “Suddenly,” from Luminal, is a plaintive folk-pop number that reflects on dreams and awakenings. Lateral‘s “Big Empty Country,” on the other hand, resounds with the kind of ambient hum that Eno has made his name on.
“Music is about making feelings happen,” Eno and Wolfe said in a joint statement. “Some of those feelings are familiar, while others may not be—or may be complex mixtures of several different feelings.”
To distinguish these feelings, the duo hasn’t just channeled them into their music, but arrayed a list of words that name these emotions. Among these are “fèath,” the Gaelic term for stillness; “pronoia,” a Greek word meaning the opposite of paranoia; “dor,” the Romanian way of referring to longing or belonging; and “mono no aware,” a Japanese phrase denoting a recognition of life’s transient nature.
“By giving a feeling a name,” they said, “we make that feeling more likely to be felt, more tangible.”
Beatie Wolfe and Brian Eno. Photo: Cecily Eno.
This talk of feelings came up at Eno and Wolfe’s first meeting in 2022, at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas. In a conversation titled “Art & Climate,” the duo discussed the role of art and design in addressing the climate crisis, while exchanging their views on art-making.
“Feeling is the beginning of thinking. Feeling is what we do before we turn things into language, before we turn them into tangible, arguably thoughts,” Eno said during the talk. “What we do when we make art is we imagine other worlds.”
The pair’s collaboration emerged when they reconnected over several meetings while they were holding exhibitions at separate galleries in London. Besides being joined by their conceptual art practices and environmental activism, they apparently now share an impulse to give form to feelings.
“Art is able to trigger feelings, or feeling mixtures, that we’ve never quite felt before,” their statement reads. “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.”
Beatie Wolfe & Brian Eno, Luminal (2025). Courtesy of the artists.
The London-born, L.A.-based Wolfe has become well-known for her multidisciplinary practice that spans art, science, and environmentalism. She’s co-released the world’s first bioplastic record with Michael Stipe; devised a sound-based installation on the brain, now on view at the Museum of Science in Boston; and mined 800,000 years of NASA’s CO2 data for a dynamic visualization that debuted at the Nobel Prize Summit in 2022. Her innovative designs landed her a solo show at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in 2018.
Eno, meanwhile, remains the celebrated light artist, ambient music pioneer, and climate activist. He’s coming off another collaborative outing with Dutch artist Bette Adriaanse for their 2024 book, What Art Does, and launching his Hard Art collective to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration to combat climate challenges. Last year also saw the release of Eno, a documentary that explores his storied career via a generative system, the sort Eno himself has been partial to.
Min Chen
Culture Editor
