Brian Eno is a nervous flyer. Despite having criss-crossed the globe on tour, the musician never feels entirely at ease on aeroplanes – not least because of their tinny, low-quality background music. “[It] actually makes you more nervous,” he told Harpers & Queen magazine in 1979. “The music is so worthless you begin to think, ‘What must the airplanes be like?’” After a long wait at Cologne Bonn Airport in Germany, he determined to produce an album that would induce calm before a flight. In the sleeve notes for the resulting Ambient 1: Music for Airports, the composer summed up his approach: “Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular,” he wrote. “It must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”
It’s a quote that Max De Lucia, co-founder of DLMDD, finds himself returning to often. De Lucia’s agency specialises in sonic branding – attempting to make brands sound as good as they look by composing bespoke arrangements that reflect their work. Airlines are among its biggest clients.
Many of us draw strong associations between music and flying. Léo Delibes’s “Dôme épais le jasmin” (“Flower Duet”) has been synonymous with British Airways since the 1980s; Jet2 has used Jess Glynn’s “Hold My Hand” in its adverts and on its flights for more than a decade. Increasingly, however, companies want something designed with them in mind. “You’ve got to create a sonic experience that is gentle, sophisticated, beautiful; that has a sense of going somewhere, with enough melody in there that you can fall in love with the thing, but not so much that it becomes irritating,” says De Lucia.
