Keith Hanlon takes advantage of an unexpected layover to create ‘Music for Airport Workers’

In an ideal world, airports would serve as temporary passthroughs, allowing passengers to whisk through security and efficiently board a flight that pushes back from the gate precisely at its scheduled departure time. 

This is not always how the process unfolds, however, with delays, mechanical issues, and cancellations leading airports to become unfortunate temporary dwellings for exasperated passengers who are forced to post up for hours, holding tight to a hope they will at some point reach their final destination. 

In November, musician, recording engineer, and Secret Studio co-owner Keith Hanlon took advantage of one of these unexpected hiccups – the airline changed his direct flight from Columbus to New York, adding a six-hour layover in Orlando – as an opportunity to revisit some generative ambient music he had been toying with but had not yet been able to dial in.

“So, that afternoon, I found a quiet corner in the terminal and just started messing with this stuff, and I started to enjoy it,” Hanlon said by phone in mid-September. “It was a weird little corner of the airport, with one restaurant but not a lot else. There were no flights coming and going, so there was really no one around. … And so, I just started creating music that made me feel certain things about air travel. … And I started tapping into my own memories. And I imagined some of the people who worked at the airport and began asking: What are their hopes and dreams? What do they do when they’re not here? What do they want to do?”

Over time, Hanlon shaped these ideas into new instrumental ambient album Music for Airport Workers (Cyclical Dreams) – a purposeful nod to Brian Eno’s landmark Ambient 1: Music for Airports – the release of which he’ll celebrate in concert at Old First Presbyterian Church (1101 Bryden Ave.) at 7 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 25, with support from CoastalDives.

Befitting the airport setting, the songs on Hanlon’s record can either carry an underlying tension (witness “Slightly Unsettled”) or open up into gorgeous ambient soundscapes that mirror cloud-dotted skies. Layered and evocative, the music is crafted as if to soundtrack hazy memories, with Hanlon acknowledging that his own travel experiences helped to shape a number of the tracks.

“I remembered one trip I took to Iceland in the middle of summer where everything was just perpetual twilight because I was so far north and it was all so disorienting,” he said. “So, there’s a track on there where I was reaching for the disorientation of that time. And it might be abstract, but it’s coming from something I was thinking about.”

Similar ideas gave shape to “On the Air,” a humid, cinematic turn colored in electronic bursts that Hanlon composed as he recalled a Fourth of July flight out of Chicago when he looked down at the city while fireworks filled the sky. “And so, I added some low frequency sounds … that mirrored explosions,” he said. “But I’m really trying to tell a story or set a scene or place in time where this thing is happening.”

At times, this meant stepping into the shoes of those workers who keep airport running, with Hanlon sharing how he began to imagine the interior lives of security agents as he refined the airy “TSA Dreamer.”

“I mean, who says, ‘I want to be a TSA agent for the rest of my life’? These are people with families and lives, and they’re just encountering travelers all day and not going anywhere themselves,” Hanlon said. “And I started to think, like, is that person an artist? An entrepreneur? Who are they at their core?”

While the album has taken on a greater sense of intent, Hanlon said the initial musical bedrock emerged randomly, created by generative software designed to trigger random MIDI notes. The musician then treated this random ambient backdrop like aural Play-Doh, extending notes, altering their keys, and changing the frequency with which they were triggered before layering in additional sounds, including guitar on the album closer. Working in this way, Hanlon said it can sometimes be a challenge to know when a composition is connecting, and there were times in making Music for Airport Workers that he needed to step away to give the material space to breathe.

“The first piece I made, it came from 45 minutes of generative music where it was like, ‘Oh, I really don’t like this,’” Hanlon said, and laughed. “Then I ended up going back to it and utilizing part of it to make something new. So, yeah, there will be times when something isn’t working and I abandon it, and then maybe I’ll come back to it later with a different point of view. But I know it’s done when I feel satisfied, and when it sounds like I’ve reached that goal of creating a world of some kind.”