Liminal review: Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe discuss their new spacebound album, Liminal

Liminal
Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe, Verve Records

On a sunny day in October, I found myself standing in a field in New Jersey, craning my head up towards a massive metal cornucopia. I was at the Holmdel Horn Antenna for what I can confidently say is the strangest album release I have ever attended. Next to me stood Nobel prizewinner Robert Wilson, an astronomer who redefined the universe – in 1964, he and his colleague Arno Allan Penzias discovered the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the faint radiation spread throughout the universe that is strong evidence to support the big bang theory.

Joining that radiation out in the universe were tracks from Liminal, the third in a series of albums from ambient music pioneer Brian Eno and conceptual artist and musician Beatie Wolfe. Wolfe and Eno describe this album as “dark matter music”, a fitting phrase for the half-melodic songs and non-songs that mystify but also draw you in. “It’s invoking the invisible that’s all around us, that’s binding everything together,” says Wolfe. Eno adds: “It’s this idea that the universe is full of stuff that we can’t sense.”

Wilson and his colleague Greg Wright reverse-engineered the Holmdel Horn, making the 16-tonne antenna into a transmitter instead of a receiver. We leaned over a signal modulator to test it, straining to hear Wolfe’s low voice through the tinny device. “Beatie has that lovely rich bass in her voice, so it’ll be hard to hear,” says Wilson. But through the horn, the true recording would play out – even if it was silent from where I stood.

“The beam width is around 1 degree, so if you do the trigonometry, by the time the signal gets beyond Earth’s orbit, it will weaken,” says Wilson. He says the album’s signal will be strong enough to hear in low Earth orbit, but by the moon, it will be overwhelmed by the CMB.

Wright and Wilson turn the horn to the sky, ready to send Liminal to the stars. This 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. Atmospheric is almost too small a word for how immersive it is. Listening brought on a feeling of endlessness, like slipping off the side of a boat into the ocean and drifting down, but in a freeing way.

After two album releases earlier this year, Luminal and Lateral, this instalment completes the trilogy. “There are many times we listen back to something and really had no idea how we made it,” says Wolfe. “Including who actually made the noises,” says Eno. “It’s like if you have an interesting conversation with somebody – it’s hard to remember how it evolved or developed; you can’t really reconstruct the flow.”

The album does feel conversational, drifting from a percussive and joyful urgency on a track called Procession to unsettling robotic lyrics spoken over a droning whirr on Laundry Room, and then to the immersive and deeply emotive Little Boy – Eno’s favourite track of the bunch.

“The biggest thing in music in the last 70 or 80 years is the ability to create new sonic spaces that couldn’t really exist, that are entirely fictional in a sense,” he says. “You can have reverbs that are a year long if you want, 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 is easy to describe ambient music as “other-worldly”, but Liminal isn’t quite that. The edges haven’t been sanded off so much that you don’t hear the humans – and the human imperfection – behind it. “It really mattered that you understand that another human being made these things,” says Eno. “Funnily enough, this is one of the reasons that I think AI doesn’t really work. It’s always really impressive when you see something made by AI; you think it looks amazing. But when you find out it’s a machine that made it, it has a kind of emptiness to it.”

When I ask them if they think anyone out there in the universe might hear their music after blasting it into space, they surprise me by saying they don’t much consider an audience when they are creating these pieces. “The nice thing about this music is we really weren’t thinking about anyone when we were making it. We made it because it was fun and exciting and felt new, these territories or feelings we were exploring,” says Wolfe.

Eno chimes in: “Play is part of science just as it’s part of art. All of the scientists I know do what they do because they’re fascinated by it. It’s the same motivation. The reason is because you feel that you’re learning something deeply important.”

I think back to Wilson, standing in the room where he revolutionised our understanding of the timeline of the universe, grinning over a laptop while we talk about where the music is now. It is past the moon, on the way to the constellation Corona Borealis, spreading out to join the rest of the dark matter.