[Cover photo credit to Cecily Eno]
Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe have shared the new single and visualizer, “What We Are” from their upcoming collaborative albums, Luminal and Lateral set to release together on June 6th, 2025 via Verve Records.
“What We Are” is a lulling and “transcendent folk lullaby.” Additionally, “Angelic background vocals emphasize the track’s celestial atmosphere.”
Luminal is described as “Dream music” whereas Lateral is described as “Space music.” The collaboration was an unexpected one for the artists.
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.
Reflecting on their collaboration on this project, which was recorded sporadically by the pair through 2024, Brian and Beatie say:
“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…
Ailyak (Bulgarian)… going slow, enjoying the process
Commuovere (Italian)… the experience of being moved
Dor (Romanian)… longing or belonging
Duende (Spanish)… getting the shivers
Fèath (Gaelic)… stillness, peace
Gezelligheid (Dutch)… warm intimacy
Ilinx (French)… strange excitement from play
Jijivisha (Sanskrit)… life lived fully
Liget (Filipino)… fiery energy, life spark
Merak (Serbian)… at one with the Universe
Meraki (Greek)… to pour yourself into something
Mono no aware (Japanese)… appreciation of life’s transience
Onsra (Boro)… the anticipation of losing love
Pronoia (Greek)… the opposite of paranoia
Sisu (Finnish)… determination, grit
Torschlusspanik (German)… fear of time running out
Ya’aburnee (Arabic)… not wanting to live in a world without someone“
