Music for Gatwick Airport

I've been appreciating the #GatwickDrones story for two reasons: 1, it's interesting to speculate, and from there let your imagination loose into a world environmental activists co-ordinate a worldwide shutdown of every airport in the world; and 2, it's ambient.  I'll begin with number 2.

Oxford University Press put up an article yesterday in celebration of the 40th anniversary of Brian Eno's Music for Airports, the genre-defining ambient album that is exactly what it says it is: spacious, drifting, airy, plaintive, stark and beautiful music for listening to when you don't feel like listening to music.  Or as OUP put it, "because no track ever settles into rhythmic patterns, it never really settles into the background. Instead, Music for Airports is arresting. But, unlike canonical classical music, it never takes one anywhere, that is, if you give it your full attention, one’s mind wanders (and wonders). The music is coy. It catches our attention and then leaves it, suspended."  That feeling of being "suspended", and paradoxically, given your (probable) purpose for being at an airport, never really taken anywhere, is the mood Music for Airports so masterfully captures.

Indeed, it isn't only music for the feeling of being at an airport, but quite literally music for airports.  As Brain explains:

"It would be much better to have music that said, 'Well if you die, it doesn't really matter'."

Nobody died at Gatwick Airport as a result of the maverick drone flights that caused the interruption of all flights over the past few days.  But many people were inconvenienced, and as is always essential to emphasise in this situation, these people were part of "families", separated by circumstance and by implication, exercising their inalienable right to be in the same place as each other for Christmas by any means necessary.  So it is that the context is formed in which any disruption to human activity is intrinsically bad, irrational, and motivated only by malevolence; and within that context, the speculation, based on absolutely nothing else at all, that the drone flyer might be an "eco terrorist" begins and festers.  Meanwhile, Extinction Rebellion's Bristol contingent target the BBC for inaccurate presentation of the environmental crisis, as the movement as a whole disassociates itself from the still anonymous drone flyer taking action which, whatever their motivations, results in the temporary suspension of greenhouse gas emissions from one airport of the 40,000 or so on the planet.  A curious situation.

I pondered last night, unaware of any such speculation taking place in the mass media, of how it might be if Extinction Rebellion co-ordinated a systematic, global campaign of disruption of every single airport in the world by flying drones into forbidden airspace, killing no-one, but inconveniencing everyone not merely the unfortunate few who happen to have been passing through one airport at the time.  How might it be?  This seems like something that wouldn't be all that difficult to achieve.  And what effect might it have?  Immediately, it would bring to a halt any further emissions greenhouse gases by one of the biggest contributors to climate change: aviation.  If the shutdown went on for long enough, who knows?  It would begin to have a measurable effect.  An effect not only on the pace of climate change, but the pace of our lives.  Airports would empty, the skies would clear, noise would fade.  Brian could provide the soundtrack.

Related posts

Musings for Airports
A House of Cards
A Quick Update
Sitting on a Landfill (Waiting for the End to Come)

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