Music For Airports — dbarrington

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︎Client – Audio Obscura
︎Role – Art direction / typography / graphic design

Cassette sleeve and in-flight magazine for Neil Stringfellow aka Audio Obscura. Released both physically in cassette tape format and to download.

A concept album reappraising Brian Eno’s seminal 1978 ambient album “Music for Airports”, asking the question how would that piece make sense in todays troubled age.

The budget was low, so the cassette design had to be prudent. So we decided to produce an “in-flight magazine” to accompany the release that features essays by Marc Weidenbaum and Mat Smith that can be downloaded digitally from Neil’s Bandcamp site.

I wanted the design to be respectful to the seriousness of the issue it addresses, but also have an energy to encourage change.

So I sought to utilise the language of airport signage both aesthetically (crude malfunctioning LED lettering), and semantically (the terms – “arrivals”, “delayed”, “gate”, “change”) to subvert their conventional deployment in an attempt to create new meaning.