The creative process that Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe carved out while making their trio of ambient albums was — perhaps surprisingly, given what they’d ultimately record — deeply normal.

Wolfe would leave her London flat by bike, ride through the park and, ten minutes later, arrive at Eno’s studio. Here the pair would hash out music on a guitar Eno acquired in 1981. If they needed an instrument they didn’t have on hand, they’d walk to the nearest pawn shop and find it.

“There were no private jets,” Wolfe says with a laugh.

From such quotidian origins has come a trinity of ambient albums: Lateral and Luminal, both released in June, and Liminal, out Oct. 10. All released on Verve Records, the projects expand Eno’s work in the ambient realm — a genre he effectively created in 1970s — and summon such deep feelings in their makers that Wolfe and Eno issued a list of emotions experienced during the creation process. (These include “ailyak,” a Bulgarian term for going slow and enjoying the process, “feath,” Gaelic for stillness and peace, and “ilinx,” French for a strange excitement from play.)

Creating work of great depth out of fairly ordinary means was not the goal. Eno emphasizes that in fact there was no goal at all, which might be why the process generated such rich results.

“The way I work in the studio when I’m on my own is a combination of absolute blind fiddling about, just walking in and saying, ‘Well, I better start doing something, because I’ve got this studio’ and then paying a lot of attention to the moment something starts to happen,” says Eno. “In a way, it depends on being goalless, and I’ve found it’s very hard to find other people who can work in that way… Beatie and I were both very reassured to be working with somebody else [with the same process].”

But while the two share this creation-for-creation’s-sake approach, their respective careers are also defined by lofty ambitions that bridge the worlds of music, visual art and science and beyond. Eno is the revered activist, artist and producer whose own work and whose work with with artists like David Bowie and U2 helped define the sound of modern pop and rock music. Wolfe is the multidisciplinary artist whose work explores topics related to climate, the effects of music on dementia and much more.

As such, it’s apt, if still fantastical, that two people who gathered instruments in pawn shops together are now beaming the music they made on those instruments into space.

On Wednesday, Oct. 15, Wolfe and Eno will broadcast the entirety of Liminal into the cosmos, using the Holmdel Horn Antenna, a 50-foot tall machine that proved evidence of the Big Bang in 1964. Nobel Prize winning physicist Dr. Robert Wilson will use Holmdel Horn Antenna (a designated National Historic Landmark since 1989) to transmit the music from its site in Crawford Hill, New Jersey.

“This music, to us, feels like an exploration of new territories, imagining future worlds that we want to live in,” says Eno, “and so it felt fitting to broadcast it into the unknown, into dark matter.” 

It’s heady stuff that considers both the most intimate parts of the internal landscape and the furthest realms of the universe, and you can join too. The broadcast will also be livestreamed around the world via this link, with Eno, Wolfe and Dr. Wilson all joining the stream to give remarks on the project. The stream begins at 5:45 p.m. ET, with the horn moved into space broadcasting orientation at 6 p.m. before the broadcast begins at sunset. The livestream will end at 6:30 p.m. ET, while the broadcast continues on the ground and among the stars.

The Antenna site will also host a listening party for the local community and campaigners who saved the area from real estate developers in 2023. These efforts made it so the Horn Antenna now sits on the 35-acre Dr. Robert Wilson Park, one of the newest parks in the United States and one that honors Wilson, who won the Nobel Prize in 1978 for his co-discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation.

“This experiment in art and technology continues a long history of scientists and artists — John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol — working together to unite the fields and learn from one another,” says Wolfe.

The space broadcast creates more of the connective tissue linking each project in Eno and Wolfe’s own work, and linking their careers as well. The two met via EarthPercent, the organization Eno co-launched in 2021, which distributes donated portions of musicians’ income to environmental causes. The two first connected on Zoom and then at SXSW 2022, where they spoke about how art can play a role in responding to the climate emergency. Finding “a very natural connection,” says Wolfe, they later convened in the studio.

“In the beginning it was just playing around with software and this very sad, out-of-tune ukulele Brian has in his studio that’s probably never had any loving handling before,” jokes Wolfe. “We made two pieces of music quite spontaneously, and it was really fun.”

So fun that they carried on working, eventually amassing 450 pieces of music. They were especially compelled by the complex feelings the music elicited for each of them while they were making it, and they thought others might enjoy entering this space of emotional conjuring as well.

“I think we find our way into the future by letting ourselves have feelings about things,” says Eno, who over Zoom is, like Wolfe, warm, funny and deeply thoughtful. “If it’s art, you can have all sorts of feelings, and you’re not harmed by them, because you can switch them off. Through art, you’re allowed to let yourself experience new feelings and see how they feel to you and to therefore be able to talk about them with other people. So art is a way of creating feelings, but it’s also a way of making feelings public and discussable among people.”

Certainly the music isn’t telling anyone how to feel, just offering a space that might make them feel something. But, given the gentle, spatial, simultaneously simple and layered productions on the three albums, one does experience the music as a sort of nervous system salve in a noisy world.

“So much information is just trying to cut above that constant noise,” says Wolfe. “So then it has to get more compressed, louder, edgier and ultimately more stressful. So to make things quiet, but quiet and still voluminous, I think is really needed right now.”

“Because otherwise,” she continues, “I think we’re so often responding in a kind of fight-or-flight mode, because we’re so disturbed, and then equally you need things that are more and more shocking to elicit any response. I think it’s revolutionary to do the opposite.”

“We’re in the context of the biggest industry in the world, advertising, that desperately wants to tell you what it is that you like, what you should like and what other people like,” adds Eno. “Then we’re in the midst of another industry, corporate politics, which is what I call modern democracy, which tells you who you should like, who you should vote for, what you want them to do. There’s a flood of stuff hitting us all the time… I think art is one of the primary ways of saying, ‘Hold on, what do I actually like? What really affects me. What are the feelings I want to have?’”

Or, has he says with a laugh while putting it more bluntly, “You just think, ‘Shut the f–k up, please. Please!’ That’s why I always feel that when I walk into a noisy restaurant in New York, I want to issue an edict and say ‘Please all of you, shut up. Start again from silence.”

Luminal, Lateral and Liminal encourage this return to baseline, and in doing so extend the music into the artistic, scientific, emotional and intellectual ecosystems in which each artist’s work resides. The space broadcast is thus an apt component, as it fuses music with science, activism, nature and the great unknown.

“Neurologist Oliver Sacks said there are two things we really need to safeguard for in order to be sentient beings on this planet, and they are art and nature,” says Wolfe. “Those are the two things that keep us alive inside. That’s what I’m always thinking about, how do you remind people of the value of art and nature, which seems so obvious but have gotten lost in the fast-tracking of everything else.”

As such, the albums and space broadcast fit into each artists’ endeavors to protect the planet and wake humanity up to the fact that the fate of the world relies on our actions. Engendering these considerations through the new music makes it both an act of hope and a rallying cry rendered in soft synths.

“I think we’re in the biggest social movement in the history of humankind,” says Eno, “which is a movement that says, ‘Hold on, we’re part of this planet; we’re part of each other; we’re part of all the other things that live here. We’re not the most important part. We’re just the part we pay most attention to.’ It’s so important that we start to get that message. When you have mental illnesses like Donald Trump telling us that it doesn’t matter, that it’s all a big hoax and ‘drill baby, drill’ — that’s the old world. We just have to just start saying to them, ‘Yes, fine. Go and ramble on about your stupid f—king coal mines. We’ve got other things to do now.’”

While each are busy people — Eno joins the conversation right after speaking in front of a crowd of thousands during an Oct. 11 pro-Palestine march in London, from a studio where he’s about to work on a series of paintings with Bette Adriaanse, his co-writer on the book 2025 book What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory, while Wolfe is continuing on in her own myriad endeavors — they reveal that they’re already working on another collaborative project. To keep it coming makes sense not only because of how much music they’ve created, but because of the interesting things it does for each them and what they think it might do for others — which isn’t one thing in particular, but just something at all.

“I think this kind of art makes you want to quietly be happy with what you’ve got,” Eno says. “It’s not telling you that you should have a different life, that you should be something else. It’s telling you to settle down and see where you are, see what you feel, and to accept the feelings that come come up from it. I don’t want to tell people what they should do. I want to offer them somewhere they could, not should, go. ‘Here’s a set of feelings you could have. What do you think about them?’ If you hate them, then you’ve learned something. But if you love them, you might want to change your life a little bit so that it has more of those feelings in it.”

The ideas of reflection and gratitude are refreshing in a world that’s constantly demanding we do more, be more, want more. Sometimes, the music ultimately reminds, its okay to just be creative with a friend, ride your bike through the park, look to the stars.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is in Cleveland. But as any Cincinnatian will tell you, it was almost built about four hours down the road in the Queen City — at which point, if they’re real music nerds, they will also explain to you why their home town is the actual birthplace of rock n’ roll. If you’re not aware, just ask filmmaker/musician Yemi Oyediran, who has poured nearly a decade of blood, sweat and tears into the new documentary King of Them All: The Story of King Records.

The 75-minute film that debuted on PBS on Oct. 10 — and which can now be streamed on PBS.org and the PBS app — is a deep dive into the story of the scrappy label founded by Syd Nathan in Cincinnati in 1943, as a place to record “hillbilly” country and western players such as Cowboy Copas and the Delmore Brothers, before it stumbled into history as the birthplace of rock, as well as funk.

Using a mixture of contemporary and archival interviews and footage, and period-appropriate rotoscope animated bits, Oyediran describes how Nathan’s one-stop recording shop and printing plant would break barriers by bringing together Black and white musicians in the studio. King Records would ultimately expand to release jazz, blues and R&B albums and singles by the likes of James Brown, Otis Williams, Hank Ballard and Little Willie John.

Oyediran, who was born in New York and spent his childhood in Nigeria — where he unwittingly got his first taste of King music via his grandmother’s bootleg copies of singles from the affiliated label Federal Records — says he’s not the only one making the case for Cincinnati to be given its props as the birthplace for rock. “I do think Cincinnati deserves that credit — and it’s not just me saying that, it’s Vince Gill and Christian McBride, who agree with that,” he says of the country and jazz legends (respectively) who appear in the film.

He describes speaking to McBride about the impact King had on his own music, and how the nine-time Grammy-winning jazz composer and performer proved that he can “go deep” on the King catalog in the same way Gill can go on for hours about all the country acts you’re probably never heard of who recorded for the label. “He knows all the licks and all the King records by heart,” Oyediran says of Gill, who appears in the movie alongside Afghan Whigs bassist/co-Founder and Cincinnati native John Curley and other prominent locals, including former news anchor (and father of George) Nick Clooney.

In the film, former Warner Records VP Seymour Stein recalls label founder Nathan being “larger than life in every way,” saying his boss was like nobody he’d ever met before… or since. Ninth grade drop-out Nathan is described as a kind of Mad Libs image of an old school music man: heavy set and possessed of a a gruff voice, his face framed by oversized glasses and an ever-present fat cigar and, because he was blind, a “scary” figure behind the wheel according to Stein, who interned at King as a high school student in 1957-1958 before taking a gig there from 1961-1963.

After working in a pawn shop and as a wrestling promoter, Nathan opened a photography shop in downtown Cincinnati that eventually turned into Syd’s Record Shop after a customer dropped off some jukeboxes he was looking to get rid of. Aided by local AM powerhouse station WLW’s “Midwestern Hayride” show, which brought a lot of country acts to town, Nathan got to know a number of musicians when they stopped by the shop to flip through records looking for songs they might record.

Because wartime rationing made it hard to find shellac to press LPs, Nathan decided to open his own pressing plant, which led to the label’s first pressing, 1946’s “Filipino Baby” by Cowboy Copas. After building an accompanying recording studio that allowed artists to not sweat how much time they were spending laying down tracks, Nathan soon had a vertically integrated system where he recorded, pressed and printed his own albums and singles, and distributed them through a nationwide network of partners. By 1949, King was the one of the largest independent labels in the nation, and the sixth-largest label in the U.S. overall.

“I learned a lot about Cincinnati and this migration that happened across the country… and in particular the Midwest racial dynamics of Cincinnati being a border town where, on this side of the Mason-Dixon line, things were very different,” says Oyediran of the city, which was considered the “gateway to the North” due to its position just across the river from Kentucky. “African-Americans could have a different freedom of economy they didn’t have in the South. It was an open market for them to buy music, and same with the Appalachians,” he adds. “They were looking for things to connect them back to their homes and keep their culture alive. Syd Nathan saw that opportunity and entered it.”

Nathan also saw how the then-burgeoning R&B style was shifting into something else — via its mix of R&B, blues and country, a trend he hopped on thanks to a cast-off tune that randy blues shouter Wynonie Harris initially turned down. “Good Rocking Tonight” was written by musician Roy Brown, who tried to sell it to Harris for $50. When Harris rejected the price, Brown recorded it himself, prompting Harris to reconsider once he heard the track on wax.

And while some say the 1951 single “Rocket ’88” by Jackie Brenston (fronting Ike Turner’s band) has what the Whigs’ Curley says are all the building blocks of what became rock — the left hand hitting a boogie woogie phrase on piano, a driving beat and handclaps —  Harris’ 1948 rendition of “Good Rocking Tonight” had all those elements, plus it was released three years earlier in 1948. Thus, Cincinnati has a “very legitimate claim” to being the birthplace of rock n’ roll, according to Curley.

Despite the groundbreaking, color-blind work that was going on at King, Cincinnati was still “very segregated” during the label’s early days, with label studio drummer Phillip Paul recalling playing shows at clubs and then walking across the street and not being able to get a cup of coffee. Things were different at King, which had an open hiring practice that didn’t discriminate based on race. By the late 40s, Nathan, a Jewish man who was quite familiar with bite of discrimination, ran the most racially integrated label in the nation. As the 1950s dawned, he also hired producer Henry Glover as his No. 2, making the arranger/songwriter and A&R man the first Black executive at a label at level.

In addition to King, Nathan set up a galaxy of other affiliated labels to sell and record what were then called “race records,” including Queen Records and Federal Records, the latter of which signed a hot young singer named James Brown. Starting with Brown’s 1958 debut, Please Please Please, which featured the No. 1 R&B hit “Try Me,” Brown had a epic run with the label, which also released 1960’s Think!, 1961’s The Amazing James Brown and his sixth, and final album for Nathan, 1963’s Prisoner of Love. The recordings helped provide the template for what would become funk music.

Oyediran says at a time when our nation is as divided as ever over race and political differences, Nathan’s focus on diversity is worth paying attention to. “Everything has to make dollars and sense,” he says of the label boss’ laser-focus on the bottom line. “You can have discord and harmony in a song, but how do you make sure you’re all grooving the same and on the same page? That’s the process that helped create America.”

The label went into decline by the mid-1960s, following a payola scandal in 1959 in which Nathan was accused of making payments to radio DJs to promote his songs. While Nathan sought a potential buyer as he battled health issues, King got a sudden jolt in 1965 when Brown released his first Billboard Hot 100 top 10 hit, “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” which made the label boss reconsider walking away.

“Syd Nathan only believed in me after we recorded ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,’” Brown says in an archival interview. “And from that point on, I can do anything I want.” And, not for nothing, many consider the next song Brown recorded at the Brewster Ave. studio, 1967’s “Cold Sweat,” the opening shot in the funk revolution.

Despite the boost from Brown — who left in 1968 in order to sign with Polydor Records — King fully shut down that year, and Nathan, who was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997, died in Florida a short time later at age 63 following years of heart issues. But King’s bulging roster of releases by the likes of jazz greats Roland Kirk, R&B acts the Platters, the Midnighters, Clyde McPhatter, Hank Ballard, the Ink Spots, Little Willie John, Brown and country performers the Delmore Brothers, the Stanley Brothers and Webb Pierce, among many others, secured its place in music history.

“We learn about how to interact with each other with play, whether it’s playing sports or playing music,” says Oyediran. “These are things that really help us figure out how to get through these divides, because we are practicing how we just make it work… You used to have to do that a lot more in America. That process is what King was and found successful, they draw people together and they made it work.”

The filmmaker says he thinks that coming together with an eye towards excellence regardless of race or background is what the nation needs to overcome the vicious divides that have torn us asunder over the past decade. “This film really articulates all of those things and points to how business can do it and how we can do it socially and the importance of doing it in America today,” he says. “We can look at all our unique stories of how working class, down-on-their-luck Americans came together to make some dope s–t.”

You can watch the King of Them All doc here.

For more than 20 years, Dan Beck worked hand-in-hand with the Epic Records’ artists roster, first as a publicity executive, product manager and then senior vp of marketing and sales. It was a golden time at the label — and among the bold-faced names he collaborated with were Sade, Cyndi Lauper, Cheap Trick, Pearl Jam, Gloria Estefan and Luther Vandross. 

But one of the artists he worked closest with was the King of Pop, Michael Jackson. He worked intimately with Jackson during both the “Dangerous” and “HIStory” era, but especially on the latter, for which he served as product manager.

In his book, “You’ve Got Michael: Living Through HIStory,” out tomorrow (Oct. 15) on Trouser Press Books, Beck gives an insider’s view of what it was like to work extremely closely with Jackson from going to his house to hanging with him in the studio to helping coordinate booking Michael Jordan — another famous MJ — for the “Jam” video.

In this exclusive excerpt, Beck takes readers inside Jackson’s Trump Towers’ apartment as they worked on the CD booklet for” HIStory” in 1994 and pulled an all-nighter.  (Excerpted from “You’ve Got Michael: Living Through HIStory” by Dan Beck © 2025 and reprinted by permission of Trouser Press Books.)

In 1994, Michael Jackson left California and moved his team to New York.

In all my years in the music business, an artist never lived as close to my office as Michael Jackson did for a good part of that year. While recording at the Hit Factory on West 54th Street, he rented a multi-level apartment in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. Residents used an entrance on East 56th Street, literally fifty yards from the entrance to the Sony building. My office on the 21st floor looked out onto 56th Street; I could almost see into the window of Michael’s apartment.

Given Trump Tower’s glitzy reputation, I was surprised at how modest the apartment appeared when you first walked in. The hallway from the elevator was unadorned. The door opened into a kitchen area, which was small enough to be called a kitchenette. The lower floor, which had two adjoining living rooms, seemed like a basic corporate condo, right down to the decorations (or lack of them). Lacking any of Michael’s personal effects, it felt like a large hotel suite.

Most of my meetings with Michael at his Trump Tower digs were quick and casual. I would drop off research information he requested or meet him for a brief discussion on our preparations for the HIStory release. But one that occurred there in early 1995 was a much bigger deal.

One of the biggest issues was what photos to include in the package. We had priced out the additional unit cost of a fifty-two-page booklet for the CD and a comparable one for the vinyl package. Designing it for the 12-inch vinyl release was easy; the images would be large and beautiful. But the booklets for the cassette and the double-CD package had to be made to work on a much smaller scale.

Narrowing down the selection of photos was difficult. For an artist whose career spanned decades, how could two pages from each year cover it? After I addressed this with Michael, he said his assistant would collect a set of photos for us to consider. Epic art director Nancy Donald would fly to New York so that she, Michael and I could finalize the selections. Miraculously, a meeting at Trump Tower was set within a week or two.

Early that Friday evening, Nancy and I went across the street to Michael’s place. His cook greeted us at the door and ushered us into the living room, which now contained a skid of boxes. A skid! A stack of boxes easily five feet tall, four feet wide and six feet long on a wooden platform, ready for a forklift to pick them up. Each box was neatly packed full of 8×10 photos spanning Michael’s life. There were thousands: Michael with Hollywood royalty like Elizabeth Taylor and nearly every living president from the last half-century. Desmond Tutu and Queen Elizabeth. Emperors. The Beatles. Photos of him with tribal kings at formal ceremonies in Africa. Michael captured in every second of performance; shots of massive audiences; countless pictures of Michael in hospitals with sick children, with armies of police and in moments of solitary reflection. There was Oprah, The Wiz, headshots, iconic body shots of his gloved hand and toes en pointe and every dimension of his phenomenal music video experiences.

Nancy and I feebly looked through a handful as we waited for Michael to join us. How in the world were we going to narrow this down to a CD booklet?

In a few minutes, Michael bounded down the stairs from the upper floor bedroom. As he sat on the stairway landing just a couple of steps up, Nancy and I settled in cross-legged on the floor. We opened the first box and began the staggering process of reviewing each photo. Nancy and I took turns holding up 8x10s like flashcards and, for the next several hours, Michael responded to each picture, occasionally surprising us with a memory of the place and time. It was an extraordinary experience to see Michael’s eyes light up as he rediscovered countless magical moments from his phenomenal life.

To eliminate a photo, he simply gave a soft “okay.” But when he wanted a picture, he would get excited and with a joyful smile say, “Must have … or will die!” He said this over and over, and we laughed through this repetitive process well past midnight, never even stopping to eat. It was an exhilarating marathon to review Michael’s photographic life with Michael himself!

By early morning, we were down to about two-hundred photos. It was still far too many for a fifty-two-page booklet. After being at it for seven or eight hours, Nancy and I were both tired. But we knew if we didn’t finish this now, we might not get another opportunity for weeks, even months. We had to keep going as long as we could keep Michael on task. By the second or third pass of those still in contention. Michael’s insistence on keeping certain shots was becoming more pronounced. I couldn’t blame him; these were all magical moments of his life.

Although it was a marathon, the night flew by, and I never realized how exhausted I was until the muted light of daybreak filtered through the curtains in the far room. Michael was a trouper. Not many artists of any stature would have collaborated the way he did that night. We had truly pulled an all-nighter and got the CD booklet down to fifty-two pages.

Even without new singles at country radio, Taylor Swift’s presence in the format is still unmistakable. Swift’s Oct. 3 release, The Life of a Showgirl, rocketed in at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 (dated Oct. 18) with 4.002 million equivalent album units in the United States, according to Luminate — the biggest first week for an album in modern music history.

Meanwhile, country stations are giving Swift’s early hits renewed play, and SiriusXM’s channel 13 is showcasing her full catalog, evidence that those Nashville-era songs remain a core part of her story even as she rules pop, and that her country roots still echo on the dial.

“We have put some throwback Taylor tracks back on,” says MoJoe Roberts, senior vice president of programming for iHeartMedia’s Last Vegas cluster, which includes country KWNR (95.5 The Bull), citing “Mean,” “Love Story (Taylor’s Version)” and “Our Song.” Roberts plans to keep them in rotation for a few weeks before re-evaluating. “We want The Bull to keep a seat at the Taylor fan table,” he states.

Swift is still a gold artist in the format, after all. Of the tracks Roberts notes, “Our Song” and “Mean” logged the most notable presence among Country Airplay reporters Oct. 3-9, according to Luminate. The former drew 800,000 impressions (up 3%), the latter, 500,000. Plus, big gains show for “Love Story” (up 39%), “Teardrops on My Guitar” (20%) and “Tim McGraw” (36%).

Swift’s catalog still connects, says Audacy country format captain Tim Roberts. “She’s older now, but so is her original audience,” he notes. “They still relate to those songs.” Some fans follow her pop releases and some don’t, he adds, “but the country audience certainly remembers those early records.”

At WYCD Detroit, where Tim Roberts also leads programming, Swift remains a reliable content driver. “This love story with Travis Kelce and the NFL connection, which touches nearly every major U.S. city, keeps her relevant,” he says. “We just did a promotion for the movie, giving away premiere tickets, and packed the theater. It was big for us.”

Beyond Country Airplay chart panelists, SiriusXM recently launched Taylor’s Channel 13 to welcome the Showgirl era. The station features music from across Swift’s career, with about a quarter of its library drawn from her first four albums, according to Kathleen St. Clair, SiriusXM’s director of music programming. “That includes the re-recorded versions of Fearless, Speak Now and Red and their respective vault tracks,” she says.

“These songs continue to be integral to appreciating the full scope of Taylor’s artistry,” St. Clair adds. “Beyond nostalgia, by having these titles live in a musical universe like Taylor’s Channel 13 alongside pop tracks and brand new songs from The Life of a Showgirl, fans can explore common threads between Taylor’s country, folk and pop sounds.”

From country playlists to pop superstardom, Swift’s music continues to bridge worlds, proof that the sound she started with in Nashville still carries far beyond it.