Music For Real Airports May 17 2010

Music For Real Airports is a live audio visual collaboration between two Sheffield based artists - The Black Dog provides the audio, with Human performing visuals. The piece will be premiered as part of Sensoria festival in the Millennium Galleries, Sheffield on Saturday 24 April.

Both artists have a background in the combination of audio and video. The Black Dog’s members, having produced music for over 25 years, taking them to regular performances worldwide, also work as graphic designers. Human is a design studio led by Nick Bax, whose clients include the American producer and DJ Dubfire, leading Savile Row tailors and MTV. He was previously a director of The Designers Republic, designing a number of high profile projects including Pulp’s album covers and working with record labels such as Warp.

Music For Real Airports takes its title from Brian Eno’s work Music For Airports, and is conceived as a response to this. Where Eno’s work has an ambient, elegiac quality that intended to calm the space of an airport, the reality of these spaces is much different. Music for Real Airports was created from many hours of field recordings from Airports around the world, as The Black Dog travelled between performances.

We talked to Martin and Rich from The Black Dog, and Nick Bax at Human’s office, before adjourning to the Fat Cat for pies.

How do you know each other / get involved in this project?

Human: We’ve known each other since the early/mid nineties

Black Dog: One of the features of Sheffield is that you’ve got small pockets of people who are artists, designers, musicians, but they’re all doing they’re own thing and never seem to collaborate. I think it’s a really weird aspect of Sheffield. If you go to London, you’ve got the Croydon dubstep and UK funky thing happening, and you’d never get that in Sheffield. And I’ve got no idea why that is. It’s happened since the early days of electronic music in Sheffield; Cabaret Voltaire, Human League, Clock DVA all had members that moved around, but they never really collaborated.

Human: For us, we’ve been going nearly three years and we’ve worked with musicians in Belgium, Dubfire and their Sci+Tec label doing live performances with them and also music video things.

Black Dog: The time was right as well. We were in a position where we had some free time. In the history of The Black Dog, it’s the first time that we’ve ever launched anything in Sheffield. Which for someone who’s been a musician here since 1976 takes some doing. I don’t know if Sheffield supports artists at an early enough stage, they have to go off somewhere else to get credibility.

So how did this project develop through time?

Black Dog: It’s got quite a long time frame. The idea stems from me hearing Brian Eno’s Music for Airports in 1979. On paper, like a lot of Brian’s stuff, it sounded fantastic, really great. And then upon hearing it, I was really disappointed. Even at an early age, I thought that doesn’t represent anything. It’s pitched as a utopia, and it’s very idealistic, and coming from a punk background I just didn’t think that worked.

We’ve been sat for the last three years just working on bits and pieces, and we eventually started talking with Nick about it as a multimedia project. Before we’d finished anything, we pitched it to Sensoria, and they said yes, which I think surprised both parties.

It wasn’t until we had that commitment from Sensoria that we actually had to nail it down.

We’d been getting strange looks in airports for recording, on buses, on planes - just trying to capture everything.

Was that conceived with the visual parts in mind?

Human: You respect the talents of each party, but we’ve talked enough that we have an idea of what would be appropriate and suitable. A lot of it is talking about other things that we’ve been to, and where it’s succeeded and failed. Other events we’ve been to, things we’ve seen, right down to the fact that we actually want to perform it. That was a big part of it.

Black Dog: I don’t think it happened on one day. We spent a lot of time talking at our monthly pie meeting. Nick came over to our studio to listen to music, and we came over here, so it was a slow progress really. The catalyst to finish it and to get on with it was Sensoria. That was totally unusual to us. We thought we’d be launching in Berlin or something, because with this you could write two sentences about it and someone would book you.

Can you each try and give us a description of what it will be like?

Human: We’ve produced a little teaser to try and answer that. The nearest thing that I can think of is an art installation. Last year I went to the Venice Biennale, and in the British Pavilion they had Steve McQueen showing just one film. You just sat and watched it for about 25 minutes in total pitch blackness. That’s the nearest thing that people will have experienced before. It’s not a gig, and it’s not going to the cinema - there’ll be no one in there with popcorn.

Black Dog: If we can create a really intense, enjoyable experience that reminds people of how they’re actually being treated and what they are being subjected to, and paying for, then I’ll be happy.

So what do you think that experience is? You’ve mentioned a ‘fear’ as the feeling of airports in other descriptions of this piece.

Black Dog: The music does have a dark undercurrent, but I don’t think there’s a question of fear, I think it’s about the security and who it’s actually for. As an experience of paying £2000 to go somewhere, being treated like that, if you were going to a restaurant or a hotel, would be unacceptable. But we accept things at face value because we’ve been told that we should fear people getting on planes with bombs and various other things that they want to carry out. I honestly don’t believe it’s that big an issue, so it’s like - who’s all this for? I see airports as a microcosm of the two extremes - something that’s really joyful, and can be a great experience, or the absolute worst experience that you’ve ever subjected yourself to. I think that’s interesting - the utopia/dystopia, and what we’ve tried to do with the graphics and music is like a fulcrum. We want to blend what Eno did with his utopia, with the kind of things that we have gone through. Quite a bit of the music was written in airports because we spend so much time in them touring.

Are there any specific airports that are apparent in the music?

Black Dog: A lot of the background recordings you can hear tend to be a really good mix. East Midlands is quite good - you can just go upstairs and have a pint, then there’s the complete terror of Leeds Bradford, where there’s a nine hour delay, and getting on a plane and being told you could be there for another two hours. But it’s about amalgamating that into one 40 minute experience. I’ve played this to a lot of people that don’t like electronic and ambient music, but because of the field recordings that are in it, they recognise the journey and the emotions in it. That, for me, is more rewarding than a good review - that people recognise something in it.

Human: There’s a big part of it, with both the music and the visuals that’s quite hard to place. It’s surprised us, that there’s quite an emotional core to it that’s come through. And we’re looking forward to seeing it on that scale, because it will amplify it all. Between the music and the visuals, there’s a whole array of emotions that seem to come through. I think that most people going there will take their own experiences with them and they will recognise it. It will prompt certain feelings in them that perhaps they hadn’t thought of before. Once you pick up your case and leave the airport you forget about it and it will provoke those feelings. There’s also a lot in there about the joy of flight that comes across.

Black Dog: The idea was to make something that documented the whole experience. Our experience is quite different to people who go on holiday, as we sometimes take two or three flights in a week. You see a lot more, the more time you spend there. We can spot somebody who’s going to be difficult on a flight at a mile.

There was a guy in Barcelona who looked as rough as anything, but he had brand new clothes on, and he just had a fag on the plane. He then got arrested on the way off, spat in a policeman’s face, hit him in the head and everyone on the bus was shouting ‘taser him!’

We’ve seen security as well where they’ve all got their heads down, looking like they are going to check everything, but once we’d gone through you culled see that they were actually all playing counterstrike on all four screens.

To come back to the visuals, and talking about people having their own experiences and emotions that they bring to this, how did you develop the images in them, as I think I expected it to be more ‘techy’ or computer generated, rather than with quite strong illustrative parts?

Human: We thought about the different experiences and how you go about depicting that. We didn’t want it to be too abstract. There are parts of the music that evoked certain things in us and so we expressed that visually, trying to amplify things that come to us from the music. We talked about the movement you might get from a conveyer belt, or being orchestrated in line, or the feeling you get when you look out of a window and see things moving beneath you.

How much improvisation is there within the performance?

Black Dog: There’ll be three computers linked together in the performance on which anyone can play anything. We’ve agreed on a sequence, although the length of the pieces could effectively be infinite. Dan from Human, who’s doing the visual mixing will be standing at the side, as if he’s the fourth member.

Human: It is all live. We have certain sequences, some are six minutes, others are just twenty seconds. But how the 45 minutes is manifested is undecided. Some parts are done with certain musical movements in mind, but other parts might drop in and out.

Black Dog: I think you’ve got to leave space for happy accidents, which is something that we’d do live as well.

That’s a bit of an Eno thing to do isn’t it?

Martin: No, I don’t think Brian Eno owns synchronicity or chance. He’s probably had a good go at it though.

Human: The performances that we’ve done to date have been with DJs, and last year we went to Miami to the Winter Music Conference, to do an event with Dubfire, and we didn’t have a clue what he was going to play. I know he doesn’t play chamber music, but we didn’t know where the breakdowns were going to be. So we kind of have a kit of parts that we take with us, that we perform live with for anything up to 3 hours. This is kind of like that, but we know the music.

Black Dog: I think that as we take the performance to other cities, it will constantly evolve as well. I’d love to do one where it was visuals on all four walls.

What are the plans for taking this beyond Sensoria?

Black Dog: Unfortunately, we announced this all a bit to late to get this on the festival circuit, but the plan is to review this and then take it to London and Barcelona and see how that evolves. The art world and the environments we are going for work on a very different time scale, and are a totally alien group of people to us, so we’re hoping that we can take it to different places. We’d actually like to evolve this over a couple of years and then take it back to Sheffield, to see what’s happened over that time. I think the launch show could be really interesting, and the end show could show the journey of the work. Ultimately, as you practice more, at you get exposed to it, it evolves into something.

It’s interesting to me because Sheffield electronic groups through history have all used visuals, even if it was just slides. It’s something that we’ve always done, to add another aspect to what we’re doing. Some groups had a digital clock that counted down, others had four or five slides. Or they had large perspex sheets in front of their synths so that people couldn’t throw beer at them.

How did the music form out of the samples as you were travelling?

Black Dog: We’ve got iPhones and recorders, and because airports repeat things quite a lot, as soon as you hear something they come out. Or, we’d just be sat with it on all the time. You get these little snippets, like a little girl who just starts singing a nursery rhyme.

Listening to the CD, I sort of got the feeling that it’s recorded from a person’s perspective, as they are travelling.

Black Dog: I don’t know if that was intentional, a few people have said that now. We certainly didn’t intend it to be a literal recording. I obviously just can’t deal with other peoples’ interpretations, I’m so intolerant! I think the only literal bit is the beginning and the end, where you have arrival and departure.

Human: I think with the visuals that they aren’t in sequence, so it jumbles it up even more. If there’s any chronology, we’ve messed with it. It’s more about feeling. Within the music there’s peaks and troughs, and it’s the same with the visuals. They don’t actually happen at the same time necessarily, you can have some quite relaxed music with intense visuals. It’s not like it builds up to one big crescendo, there’s a lot of different parts that are quite rabid. I think there are some parts of it where people are going to want to get out of the room. There are some quite heavy going parts in it, where it will be very loud, very intense and slightly unpleasant. And then some parts that are just beautiful.

All images courtesy of Human. All rights reserved.