"What kind of music would sound good in a building like that?" Brian Eno asked himself while waiting for a plane at Cologne Airport. That simple question led to his hugely influential Music For Airports back in 1978.
What soon became know as 'Ambient Music' has since become all encompassing label and embraces Deep Listening, another site specific album from 1989; a project conceived by American accordonist Pauline Oliveros.
Together with trombonist Stuart Dempster and vocalist Panaiotis, Oliveros recorded in a cavernous underground cylinder at a former army base in Fort Worden, Washington. This space, nicknamed 'The Cistern Chapel', was originally constructed to hold up to two million gallons of water and to withstand possible military air strikes. The size , shape and internal web of pillars meant that the cylinder had extraordinary acoustics and the four long tracks on the album here consisted of sustained, calming tones which exploited the building's tremendous reverberations.
Music For Airports and Deep Listening are two albums which came to mind while listening to and reading about the Concrete Antenna project.
This is the work of three artists based in Scotland : Rob St. John is a folk musician, writer and field recordist from East Lancashire, Simon Kirby a Professor of Language Evolution at the University of Edinburgh and Tommy Perman an artist, designer and musician.
The album derives from a sound installation commissioned by the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop to inaugurate a privately funded landmark tower at Newhaven, open to the public from 11th March to the end of September 2015.
Using piano, audio archives and new field recordings, the music combines elements of modern classical composition, organic drones and minimal electronica. Sound sources include the nearby docks and harbours so, for example, numerous foghorns were sampled to make what they call ‘fogorgans’.
As the concrete and brick construction serves no practical purpose, it could be viewed as a temporary folly. Many of the compositions are inspired by the unusual dimensions of the 28m high tower. A rectangular opening at the top, for instance, served as a giant resonating antenna. In addition the sound experimentation was shaped by the local coastal environment and the changing weather conditions.
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The two sides to the album are named Tide In and Tide Out. A specially created tide table has been created by Tommy Perman and the listener is encouraged to check this before selecting the appropriate side to play.
The site-specific elements are identified by a box set which includes art prints and essays but, as with Eno's work and the Deep Listening project, the music has to exist apart from the architecture that inspired it. In this regard, the project is less successful.
The 12” vinyl album is framed by the two longest tracks Church Bells (6:09) and Harbour Fireworks (4:56) but with a playing time of a relatively modest 36 minutes, the 12 pieces mostly seem like fragments rather than complete, multi-faceted instrumental compositions.
Inevitably, only visitors to the tower will have heard this music as intended. Within the unique setting the sounds were amplified through a vertical arrangement of speakers and were even responsive to their movements through strategically placed heat sensors.
The home listener gains a flavour of this fascinating experimental work but has to be content with imagining what the deeper sonic in-situ experience was like.
Concrete Antenna website
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