You'd be forgiven for doing a double-take when reading the title of this particular album. No, it isn’t a re-issue of Eno’s seminal ambient record Music for Airports, but instead is the latest work from experimental artist Pierce Warnecke, who has dug deep into his box of ambient electronica to create an imagined world predicated on one that is wholly real. Music from Airports is an ode to that most utilitarian of spaces – the airport, universally characterised by an absence of atmosphere and personality, and one that is reviled by the artist himself. Using hastily captured musical soundbites (he refrains from calling them field recordings) taken from airports across the world, the US-born artist has moulded a set of electronic soundscapes that deftly employ his (sometimes) trademark minimalism underlined by repetitive looping, deep listening and glitch.

Pierce Warnecke has spent most of his career working across multiple media with performances, concerts and installations presented at almost every avant-garde/experimental music festival you can think of: Rewire, Mutek, Elektra Montreal and Sonic Arts. Alongside collaborations with artists such as Matthew Biederman, Myriam Bleau, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Warnecke is also a prolific solo artist, but his earliest days saw him working as a sound designer for music software, something that gave him the electro-synth grounding that is patently evident on 2011 track ‘The Machine Serves’ (taken from the EP of the same name). Released on Dutch dance label Fremdtunes, Warnecke flexed his wonky pseudo-dancefloor muscles for a bit, but refused to pigeonhole himself and began to move through the world of the avant-garde relishing the experimental and effortlessly switching between genres, from the challenging noise music of 2017’s Couleurs Chimériques with Rodolph Loubatière to the diametrically-opposed ambient experimentation of his 2015 solo album Darkness in Daylight; the latter a hint at where we find him today.

For Music From Airports, released on the Room 40 label, Warnecke has embraced a philosophy centred around an interest in the effects of time. Whether that is modification, deterioration or disappearance, his approach has a hauntological aesthetic whereby, as he himself says, “signified meanings, symbols and cultural connections have become residual ghosts; abstractions with loose connections to reality, like distant memories.”  He focuses on the contrast in activity – from the static to the frenetic – so endemic to the airport environment, a place he vilifies for isolating the individual from both reality and time. A form of purgatory perhaps? The ultimate waiting room.

And so here Warnecke has attempted to convert the experience of the airport from something unpalatable to something that is both uplifting and transcendent, taking snippets of sounds from airports - spanning Montreal to Copenhagen, Illinois to Zurich - and using them as the basis for his own sonic framework. For each piece, he uses a looped short recording of background music, recorded via his phone, which when transported back to the privacy of his studio was processed and reprocessed to produce eight pieces of loop-based, minimalist, ambient electronica. This is music designed to distract you from the boredom, from the drudgery and take you into another radical sphere. But not in the Eno way, this isn’t about blending into the background – this is instead a deeply fulfilling soundscape journey.  Absolutely wonderful. Listen here.