Brian Eno’s Music for Airports is perhaps the most aptly titled album in musical history. Of his ambient work, Eno once famously said that he meant for the music to function like aural wallpaper, discretely enveloping the listener in an atmosphere, mood, or tint.

From the moment Music for Airports begins, with its purposeful title and sublimely spare and elegant piano line washed in an ebb and swell of synthesized sound, thoughts of airports are conjured in a new light. Whether the gentle, recursive structures of the song evoke for you images of behemoth airbuses gracefully taxiing across runways towards takeoff – as appertained through the silent glass walls of an air terminal at early dawn hours – or instead encourage you to ruminate abstractly over the collective grandeur of the whole enterprise of mass international air travel itself, the experience is the same: one is reminded, in the subtlest of ways, that hiding behind the grim, grey frenetic mayhem of this most bustling of democratic institutions – the airport – lie scenes and abstractions pregnant with grace, wonder and beauty.

Five local experimental musicians pay tribute to Eno’s landmark achievement this fortnight at Black Box Theatre in a program titled Brian Eno’s Music for Airports – New Audio-Visual Counterpoint. The musicians – Gaybird, Aenon Loo, Tang Lok Yin, Steve Hui, and Choi Sai Ho – each perform an original experimental work, before joining one another as an ensemble to play a version of Music for Airports rearranged by Steve Hui, working under his Nerve moniker. Recreating the old Kai Tak Airport in a dynamic audio-visual portrait, the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble also perform a sample-heavy electro-acoustic set with video accompaniment from Adrian Yeung and Silas Fong. Turn up and show your support for dreamy sounds in dreamy spaces.

Patrick Brzeski

Music for Airports held at Kwai Tsing Theatre on January 29 and 30. Tickets: www.urbtix.hk, 2734 9009.