Music for Fulfilment Centres

calm!

Music for Fulfilment Centres

London, UK: Moonside Tapes, 2021

Audio cassette

Edition of 25

On the cover design for the outer sleeve of Music for Fulfilment Centres the Amazon logo is replaced by the word 'Ambient', to further reinforce the connection to Brian Eno's watershed LP Music For Airports. The 1978 recording was subtitled "Ambient 1" and was the first in a series of four titles under the moniker that Eno released between '78 and '82 (the others being The Plateaux of Mirror with Harold Budd, Day of Radiance with Laraaji and On Land - which was released as a solo record, but featured Bill Laswell, Jon Hassell, Michael Brook and Daniel Lanois).  

Eno had previously released ambient recordings - including the superior Discreet Music from three years prior - but codified the practice in '78, effectively coining the term to describe a genre that now dates back over a century (Erik Satie's "Furniture Music" of 1917 had similar goals of producing engaging background music). 

The connect to a particular place came when Eno was stuck waiting in a German airport for several hours and found himself irritated by its uninspired atmosphere. The project was originally conceived of as an art installation, featuring continuously looped sounds to defuse the tense, anxious atmosphere of an airport terminal by avoiding the derivative and familiar elements of standard "canned music". Eno's goal was to create music that would "accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."

On this release calm! find a location even more cavernous than Cologne's Bonn Airport, which is approximately 65 660 square feet in size:

"Around 800,000 square feet in size, [Amazon] sortable fulfilment centres can employ more than 1,500 full-time associates. In these buildings, Amazon employees pick, pack, and ship customer orders such as books, toys, and housewares. Thanks to the innovations of Amazon Robotics, associates often work alongside robots, allowing them to learn new skills and helping create a more efficient process to meet customer demand." 

Music for Fulfilment Centres is available from Bandcamp, here, for £5 GBP or more. Price includes the cassette, downloadable MP3/FLAC files and unlimited streaming via the Bandcamp app. The page lists the cassettes as being "individually dubbed in real time", which might suggest that each cassette is, emptying as looping system similar to Eno's. However, a track listing (see below) counters the idea, making it unclear why the short blurb about the project noted the dubbing process. 

Track listing: 

1. Safe Stow 03:26

2. Hazmat 03:57

3. Tote Poem 02:35

4. Tramadol 07:20

5. Smoking Area 02:54

6. Mass Receive 07:22

7. Communal Area / Lockers 09:36

8. Clean Scanner 03:30