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How Things are Made – Celebrating Brian Eno’s seminal work, “Music for Airports”
PIT Music for Airports is an annual celebration of ambient music and emotional atmosphere in travel, featuring Pittsburgh-based artists to reinterpret Brian Eno’s seminal work, Music for Airports, and transform the airport into a space of calm, creativity, and serenity. In March 2026, travelers and staff at PIT will again experience ambient music from March 9th – March 12th.
”The airport is a slow teleportation device that allows a person to wake up in one place and dine in another, thousands of miles away. This rush of possibility arouses different emotions: ebullience and ecstasy, stress and annoyance, pensiveness and acceptance. Brian Eno coined the term “ambient” to describe the music and, perhaps, also set it apart from the hollow cheerfulness of muzak and easy listening. Ambient music does not insist on an emotional change. It doesn’t insist on anything. Eno wrote, “it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”
Formed in 2016, How Things Are Made–the trio of Brian Riordan, Matt Aelmore, and David Bernabo–are a contemporary electroacoustic band, often performing ambient and drone-based works to accompany dance and reiki sessions or, alternatively, experimenting with computer programming to create new processes for making sounds.
For a performance at the airport, the band would be the duo of Brian Riordan and David Bernabo. We would like to take a page from Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports” record and produce gentle, tonal music that emulates the feeling of floating in space and “diffusing the anxious atmosphere of an airport terminal.” We will be playing synthesizers and custom electronic software to allow for real-time composition.
The band has released 84 records, produced two six-hour concerts overstuffed with guest musicians, commissioned 50 compositions from the likes of Sarah Hennies, Helen He, and Jonghee Kang, and most recently produced a series of four-hour continuous drone music concerts that were accompanied by dancers from The Pillow Project.