Pierce Warnecke - Music From Airports (2025)

A Note From Pierce

How to describe an airport?

They are non-places of transience with zero individuality. Endless gray halls with fluorescent lights, glass and concrete made to isolate you from reality and time in a purgatory that is almost always the same, no matter which one you find yourself in. The only living things are the endless waves of humans who are fed in, sorted and sent back out of these giant climate controlled vivariums. Restricted spaces under surveillance full of exhausted traveler's stumbling to their gates or waiting for hours in endlessly regenerating lines in jet lag-induced dazes, all of whom have one common goal: to go anywhere else but there. 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 composition on this album stems from a single airport recording, usually less than a minute in length and always containing some kind of radio friendly music playing in the background. They were all done in haste on my phone; they should not be considered field recordings as very little care was given to the sonic environment and technical means employed. Each of these found soundscapes was then processed in many ways in my studio, but essentially ine recording gave one composition.

While ambient music is often referred to as furnishing music (Satie), in the sense that it is a partial component of reality, leaving room for other experiences, it has also unfortunately been co opted by television, advertisers, stores and Hollywood throughout the 20th century as a means to occupy you while you watch, wait, eat or buy. This is never more clear than in an airport. I don’t want to think of music as a filler for dull moments; I prefer to think that it needs only to exist for itself and for the listener, and not to make up for another experience lacking in substance. So, this music is not for airports. This music is for you, the listener.

Whether you’re standing in line with headphones or stuck in your car in traffic or in a quiet studio with nice near-field monitors or at the gate waiting for your delayed flight, I’m just happy you’ve taken the time to listen.