BP wants to grasp, like Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, the past, to a degree limited by the information it can procure on the past, about the experiences of the past in its cultural-political-economic context, when it can be bothered. But it’s not Marxist.
This week/ today it’s Music for Airports.
For hipsters and dorks alike, Eno rules. His ambient album, coming two years after ambient collaborations with David Bowie, and after the fiddlings of La Monte Young, Cage, Penderecki, and the drugged noodlings of Tangerine Dream, is the focal point of the ambient explosion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykJg-vE3k-E
In 1978, a few years after the modernising effects of the Equal Pay Act (in force 1975), decimalisation and EU membership (1973), the softening of England to women and foreigners, the decomposition of melodies into sounds, drones, textures became – interesting; beautiful, even. Eno composed public space music: functional, democratic, music for strolling and waiting in public venues. Benjamin would have approved: Eno is a flaneur’s composer, and the flaneur was the subject of the Arcades Project. But as the topic of wandering around enclosed shopping spaces became less interesting to us (the uglier the interiors of those buildings got), so perhaps music for airports will need to become music for space shuttles, for aliens – for whatever. As science fiction reminds us, we never get as far as we think as fast as we think.
