This is a loose collection of new and ongoing work exploring the grey area between location recordings, synthetic sound, and the feeling of the idea of silk scarves in the air. These pieces begin with listening-through-recording, in which I sit with a portable recording device for 5-10 minutes in a location that seems well suited to a kind of silence, and I try to listen to everything that I imagine the microphone can hear. At a later point, I return to each of these recordings and compose a piece around them, but leaving each original location recording largely unedited. These pieces exist almost as fragrance, passing clouds of colouration suspended in air.

The following are some aggregated thoughts regarding historical and current contexts around “ambient music”, which one can’t help but feel an ambivalence about as composer and listener.

1/ Installations of Brian Eno’s Music For Airports in actual airports seems historically to have had issues being well-received, even sparking protest from airport workers at Berlin’s former Tegel International Airport in 1984.

2/ Music for air (-port), an open channel. Someone at a party in Backsteinboot in Berlin told me about her hesitation to accept her friend’s offer for a remote energy healing session (mediated through a phone call, without video and without conversation), and how this reminded me of Brian Eno’s enthusiasm in the late 1980’s for the then-recent invention of the fax machine, through which he could readily send and receive materials from his friends.

3/ The airport as a non-site, liminal space-time between modes of transit and time zones. But also, how application of reverb or convolution algorithms can give anything a quality of place-ness. Para-psychogeography, or psyche without site. Avoiding the term “soundscape”.

4/ Music streaming platforms as airports for music, architectures of perpetual transit. Within this regime, it’s harder to say, what isn’t ambient music? Music for airports for music.

5/ In his introductory notes to various recordings published on compact disc, the composer Jakob Ullmann writes “Please choose, for each piece, the volume settings of your sound system so as to just barely mask the ambient sounds in the room”.

As a final note: this collection is open to other contributors and collaborators, so please get in touch if (1) you have work that you’d like to share under this umbrella; (2) have a sound recording you’d like to have incorporated into a composed piece; or (3) would like to commission work around a specific site/sound.

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