Beatie Wolf (left) and Brian Eno prepare to release their new album
Cecily Eno
Liminal
Brian Eno and Beatie Wolf, Verve Records
On a sunny October day, I found myself standing in a field in New Jersey, looking up at a huge metal cornucopia. I attended the Holmdel Horn Antenna and I can confidently say that it was the strangest album release I have ever attended. Standing next to me was a Nobel Prize winner Robert Wilsonthe astronomer who redefined the universe – in 1964, he and his colleague Arno Allan Penzias discovered the cosmic microwave background (CMB), a faint radiation spreading throughout the universe, providing compelling evidence to support the theory big bang theory.
This radiation in the Universe was joined by traces from Liminalthe third in a series of albums by ambient music pioneer Brian Eno and conceptual artist and musician Beatie Wolfe. Wolfe and Eno describe the album as “dark matter music”—an apt description for semi-melodic songs and non-songs that are puzzling yet engaging. “He calls upon the invisible that surrounds us, it ties everything together,” says Wolfe. Eno adds, “The idea is that the universe is full of things we can't sense.”
Wilson and his colleague Greg Wright redesigned the Holmdel Horn, turning the 16-ton antenna into a transmitter rather than a receiver. We leaned over the signal modulator to test it, trying to hear Wolfe's deep voice through the tinny device. “Beaty’s voice has a beautiful rich bass to it, so it’s going to be hard to hear,” says Wilson. But the speaker was playing a real recording – even if it was quiet from where I stood.
“The beam width is about 1 degree, so if you do trigonometry, by the time the signal gets out of Earth's orbit, it will be attenuated,” Wilson says. He says the album's signal will be strong enough to be heard in low Earth orbit, but on the Moon it will be overwhelmed by the cosmic microwave background radiation.
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Brian Eno says the album suggests that the universe is full of things we can't perceive.
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Wright and Wilson turn their horn toward the sky, ready to send a signal. Liminal to the stars. The album paints a strange landscape, alternating between lush ambient tracks built from layers of synths and guitars and songs that highlight Wolfe's mournful vocals. Atmosphere is too small a word to describe how exciting it is. Listening to it felt timeless, like sliding off the side of a boat into the ocean and being carried down, but liberating.
After releasing two albums earlier this year, Luminal And Sidethis part completes the trilogy. “A lot of times we'll listen to something and have no idea how we did it,” Wolfe says. “Including those who actually made the sounds,” Eno says. “It's like when you have an interesting conversation with someone – it's hard to remember how it progressed or progressed, you can't really recapture the flow.”
The album does feel conversational, moving away from the percussion and joyful urgency of a track called Procession alarming robotic texts spoken over a buzzing noise Laundryand then to an exciting and deeply emotional Little boy – Eno's favorite track.
“The most important thing about music over the last 70 or 80 years is the ability to create new sound spaces that could not exist in reality and that are in some sense completely fictional,” he says. “If you want, you can use reverb for a year or create a space like an infinitely large building… I think what we're interested in is exploring these new spaces and seeing what it's like to be inside them.”
It's easy to call ambient music “otherworldly” but… Liminal that's not quite right. The edges are not polished so much that you cannot hear people behind it – and human imperfection. “It was very important to understand that another person did these things,” says Eno. “Ironically, this is one of the reasons why I think AI doesn't really work. It's always impressive when you see something created by AI; you think it looks amazing. But when you find out that a machine created it, there's a kind of emptiness to it.”
When I ask them if they think anyone in the universe might hear their music after launching it into space, they surprise me by saying that they don't really care about the audience when they create these works. “The best thing about this music is that we didn't really have anyone in mind when we made it. We made it because it was fun and exciting and felt new, these territories and feelings that we were exploring,” says Wolfe.
Eno chimes in: “Play is part of science, just like it's part of art. All the scientists I know do what they do because they're fascinated by it. It's the same motivation. The reason is that you feel like you're learning something very important.”
I remember Wilson standing in the room where he revolutionized our understanding of the universe's timeline, grinning at his laptop as we talk about where music is now. It lies behind the Moon, on its way to the constellation Corona Borealis, expanding and joining the rest of the dark matter.
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