Placelessness

Excerpted from Vanishing Point
Music used to fill a space by accommodating itself to a particular environment rather than simply blending into it. It as music that was centerless and nonlinear, blurring distinctions between foreground and background. The work puts the user’s subjective experience at the center, because it is meant to be perceived as part of the background that is already taking place.

Film music is really music with its centre missing. Without seeing the film, you have something that has a tremendous amount of space in it. That space is important as its the space that invites you as a listener into the music. Enables the sounds of the outside world to penetrate into the composition. The music was subtle enough to fade into the background of the listener’s environment, but at times it also had the power to subsume that environment by subtly coloring it with its own tonal palette. Immersion was really the point. We were making music to swim in, to float in, to get lost in.

Eno’s music asserted the importance of background and atmosphere in defining a sense of place, as in the case of an airport or other transit zones, a sense of placelessness. In a manner unlike his, the photographs I take use emptiness and an overpowering sense of atmosphere, at the core of the human experience. Forms of descriptive information are suppressed. The work tends toward the detached, even the austere. The places depicted are mundane, easy to overlook or forget, and yet anything but banal.