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Music For Real Airports (5 CD Boxset) – Available Now

Posted on 4th June 2026 in Mixes, Releases

Music For Real Airports (5 CD Boxset) by The Black Dog - Promotional artwork

Collected together for the first time, this five-CD box set brings together the various works from the Music For Real Airports project.

The collection not only includes Music For Real Airports, Music For Airport Lounges, and Music For Dead Airports, but also features a substantial amount of new, unheard material, alternate mixes and live recordings taken from our archive. This second box set reflects a long and uneasy relationship with airports.

After years spent sitting in airports, travelling to and from gigs, we have seen past the polished surfaces and the promises of comfort and efficiency. They present a controlled fiction, a managed calm built on delay, surveillance and routine.

Across five hours of music, much of it previously unheard and available for the first time, the box set confronts the modern reality of travel and the corporate structures that shape it. The music documents these spaces as they are experienced rather than as they are sold.

Music For Airport Lounges – Out Now

Posted on 24th February 2023 in Releases

Music For Airport Lounges by The Black Dog

Our new long-form ambient album, “Music For Airport Lounges”, revisits our Music For Real Airports project, presenting a collection of archive material, unreleased tracks and demos. It’s out now at DustStore.com, Bandcamp and all of your favourite streaming sites.

Supporter Downloads
The free downloads for our supporters at Patreon are now live, including the super-hi-res 24bit WAV and FLAC files. You can join now and access all of the downloads for the price of beer each month:
https://www.patreon.com/theblackdogma

Download Direct
DustStore.com (UHD 24bit 96k WAV & FLAC)
DustStore.com (16bit WAV & MP3)
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Music For Airport Lounges – Coming In February

Posted on 3rd February 2023 in Releases

Music For Airport Lounges by The Black Dog

Going back through the archives from our Music For Real Airports period, we’ve selected a collection of unreleased tracks and demos to construct a new ambient mix.

Order Direct:
DustStore.com
Bandcamp

About
“We hate to think about how much time we’ve spent in Airport Lounges. We didn’t record on every single visit but we still ended up with over 200 hours of recordings in our archives – that’s nearly 8.5 days. These recordings became the backbone of the project, as we began to work them into tracks, while simultaneously sitting in airports. The circle was complete.

Airport lounges are a common source of frustration for all travellers; overcrowded, uncomfortable, and filled with a variety of unpleasant smells, not to mention the equally unpleasant people barking orders. Worse still, many airports have limited seating and amenities. During long wait times, this can become quite overwhelming.

Philosophically, the nightmare of airport lounges can be seen as a representation of the existential angst and anxiety of modern life, all compacted into one small area. It is a physical manifestation of our inability to escape the constraints of time and space, as well as our inability to control our own destiny. As a result, airport lounges can be seen as a negative reflection of the human condition, and a symbol of the lack of freedom we experience in our everyday lives.

This album of unreleased recordings documents an earlier time, when 3 weekends a month were spent in airports and this temporary home became our recording studio. A recent visit confirms that nothing has changed.”

Released 24th February 2023.

Music For Real Airports – Repress Shipping Now

Posted on 20th January 2023 in Releases

Music For Real Airports by The Black Dog (Limited Edition Vinyl RePress)
<a href="https://duststoredigital.com/album/music-for-real-airports-repress">Music For Real Airports (Repress) by The Black Dog</a>

The 2023 pressing of Music For Real Airports from Dust Science is shipping now!

We’ve got a lovely triple-vinyl cut from Air Studios and a very special cassette, exclusively from DustStore and our Bandcamp page. Vinyl, CD and downloads will be available from all the usual culprits.

Supporter Downloads:
https://www.patreon.com/theblackdogma

Order Direct From Us:
https://www.duststore.com/pages/music-for-real-airports
https://duststoredigital.com/album/music-for-real-airports-repress

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Music For Dead Airports – Out Now

Posted on 6th January 2023 in Releases

Music For Dead Airports by The Black Dog

Our new EP, Music For Dead Airports, is available now from DustStore.com, Bandcamp and all the usual streaming and download services.

Supporter Downloads
As always, our supporters on Patreon can download this release right now. For the price of a nice beer each month, you can get this and loads more downloads too:
https://www.patreon.com/theblackdogma

Buy Direct:
DustStore.com (Hi-Res 24bit WAV & FLAC)
DustStore.com (16bit WAV & MP3)
Bandcamp

Around the World
kompakt.fm
Boomkat
Juno Download
Bleep
Beatport
Spotify
Apple Music
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traxsource
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Music For Dead Airports – Coming 6th January 2023

Posted on 20th December 2022 in Releases

Music For Dead Airports by The Black Dog

To celebrate the re-issue of “Music For Real Airports” on Dust Science, we’ve created a brand new EP, this time focusing on local efforts to bring air travel to the locals around our hometown of Sheffield.

“The Black Dog present four tracks written in Sheffield airports, car parks and on the land where both once stood, channelling what should have been, instead of the feverish nightmares they became. Once again we find ourselves reflecting on the difference and why it has to be so.

Sheffield has a terrible history with airports, both attempts have now failed. Sheffield City Airport was first proposed in 1968, but it wouldn’t open until 1997. Even the low-cost flight revolution couldn’t save it, the business model was based on high-fare short-hop journeys. To make matters worse, many of the aircraft operated by the low-cost providers couldn’t actually land at the airport. The last flight left in 2002. The airport was later sold for a very controversial £1.

Doncaster Sheffield Airport, otherwise known as Robin Hood Airport, opened in 2005 and boasted a longer runway, suitable for much bigger aircraft. It managed to attract a few low-budget operators until Flybe and Wizz Air announced they’d be terminating all their flights, with the final one leaving on the 5th of November 2022.”

Released 6th of January 2023

Pre-Order Now At:
DustStore.com
Bandcamp

Music For Real Airports – Repress On Dust Science

Posted on 2nd December 2022 in Releases

Our 2010 album “Music For Real Airports” has been re-pressed and re-issued on Dust Science. We have a lovely limited edition package comprising of 3 x 12″ records, pressed on 180g heavy-weight vinyl, using brand new, great-sounding lacquers from Air Studios. Along with this, we’ve also re-pressed the CD and got a tasty special edition cassette.

Released on the 20th of January 2023, pre-order at:
DustStore.com
Bandcamp

Music for Real Airports is a multimedia art project and album by electronic musicians The Black Dog and interactive artists Human. It is a response to the reality and experience of airports and air travel. It’s also a contemporary reply to Brian Eno’s idealistic ambient works from the 1970s.

The Intent
Airports are important and revealing. They are dystopian microcosms of a possible future society. The necessity of safety requires that they be systems of human control which only elevate the stress of their transient occupiers. Airports promise travel, exploration and excitement but endlessly break that promise with their stale, tedious pressure. They are intense and overwhelming environments. Anyone who travels by air will have been puzzled by the way that airports tend to reduce us to worthless pink blobs of flesh, the human equivalent of the bags on the conveyor belt. Yet despite the frustration of being in that atmosphere, some of the best aspects of human nature are revealed, alongside some of the very worst.

Airports make for great “people-watching”. Airports have some of the glossiest surfaces in modern culture but the fear underneath remains. Unlike Eno’s Music for Airports, this is not an album to be used by airport authorities to pacify their customers. It’s not a utilitarian accompaniment to airports, in the sense of reinforcing the false utopia and fake idealism of air travel.

The Album
The resulting album is bittersweet, enveloping and engaging the listener. It is ambient in tone but highly focused. This is not sonic mush, nor is it adolescent noise. Much of the raw material was made in airports over a three-year period. While on tour, The Black Dog made 200 hours of field recordings, much of which was processed and combined with new music in the airport itself, waiting for the next flight. This vast archive was slowly distilled into a set of particularly evocative pieces of music. Composed in large degree of methodical drones, there is little in the way of beats until halfway through – yet rhythm is plentiful within the buzzing synthetic warmth.

This record is not necessarily a comfortable listen, it captures the spectrum of emotions stirred by airports. There may be tension and disappointment, but there is also romance and excitement.