Who doesn’t love an airport? Well most people to be honest, they serve a purpose to get you from A to B in the least offensive manner possible. But there is something quite offensive about their attempts at inoffensiveness. US born Europe based Pierce Warnecke agrees. He is a digital artist working equally in the sonic and visual domains and is particularly interested in re-adapting ‘existing objects and materials into parallel contexts where their signified meanings, symbols and cultural connections have become residual ghosts.’ When we spoke to him in 2016 he told us that he liked the idea of things being able to break down and change. You can check out that interview here.
This is what Pierce has to say about airports:
“Sonically the airport is a nightmare. Giant reverberous rooms made of reflective materials filled with clattering rhythmic sounds; a textbook recipe for continuous and inaudible din, on top of which popular music is lightly sprinkled in a failed attempt to dissimulate the background noise. I thought of ways to make my travel through airports a little more enjoyable. I naturally thought of Eno and his music made for airports, an idealized soundtrack to replace the ones there. And while I agree with him that the prevalent and unavoidable ‘muzak’ is tedious, I thought that instead of rewriting a new score for a space I had an aversion to, I could try to salvage what was already there: extracting small bits of the omnipresent music and turn it into something more to my taste. In French, the word ‘détournement’ fits nicely to this approach of turning something away from its original purpose (which is curiously also the word used for hijacking an airplane).”
Each piece on his forthcoming album Music From Airports stems from a phone recording he made of an airport space with an offensively inoffensive piece of music bubbling away in earshot. He then processed these recordings to expand upon them and create a more evocative, mysterious and textural experience like ‘To Fit A Building inside a Box (MDA).’It turns out the sound world of airports doesn’t need to be so horrible – apparently they just choose to have it that way.
Music From Airports will be released via Room40 on the 28th of March 2024. You can find it here https://room40.bandcamp.com/album/music-from-airports
