Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe have released “Big Empty Country (Edit),” a preview from their upcoming joint project Lateral, due June 6, 2025, alongside its companion album Luminal. Both works mark a surprising and exploratory turn in their careers, one neither artist anticipated.
Lateral delves into ambient “space music,” an electronic music genre shaped by atmosphere and emotion rather than structure. The collaboration stems from Eno and Wolfe’s shared environmental advocacy; they first connected during a SXSW panel titled Art and Climate, later named one of the festival’s top talks in 25 years. They reunited through concurrent gallery exhibitions in London, where their creative exchange began to evolve into music.
Recorded intermittently throughout 2024, the project seeks to give shape to complex emotional states, many without direct English equivalents. In a joint statement, the artists described the music as a way to “trigger feeling mixtures we’ve never quite felt before,” likening each track to “the mother of a feeling.”