Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe have released Liminal, their new collaborative album – and in an extraordinary gesture, the pair will be broadcasting the record into space.
Set to take place on 15th October at 11pm (6pm ET), the transmission will use the historic Holmdel Horn antenna in New Jersey, the same instrument that helped detect the cosmic microwave background radiation and confirm the Big Bang theory. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Dr Robert Wilson, who made that discovery, will assist in sending Liminal beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
“It felt fitting to broadcast it into the unknown, into dark matter,” Eno said. “This music, to us, feels like an exploration of new territories, imagining future worlds that we want to live in.”
Liminal is the third in a loose trilogy that began with Luminal and Lateral. If the former was “dream music” and the latter “space music”, this new work – described by Eno and Wolfe as “dark matter music” – finds them venturing into still stranger territory. “Liminal dwells somewhere between Lateral and Luminal, but also in its own place entirely,” they explained. “It feels like the beginning of exploring a new terrain of music that is about future landscapes, environmental spaces and atmospheres, that a human presence (of sorts) occasionally floats in and out of.”
The album continues the pair’s fascination with the intersection of art, environment and technology. Recent single ‘Procession’, accompanied by a video directed by Orfeo Tagiuri, exemplifies that blend of ambient depth and human texture that has defined their collaborations to date.
For Wolfe, the project follows a prolific stretch of work spanning design, activism and environmental innovation – from bioplastic records to data-driven art installations. Eno, meanwhile, remains as restless as ever, fresh from curating Together for Palestine at London’s OVO Wembley Arena last month and releasing What Art Does, his new book with Bette A., earlier this year.
The decision to beam Liminal into space, then, feels emblematic: part scientific tribute, part philosophical statement. As with much of Eno’s and Wolfe’s work, the gesture blurs the line between art, experiment and act of imagination – a broadcast not just into the cosmos, but toward possible futures.
Liminal is out now via Decca Records.
