Empathy drill: A complete thought from the disordered life + mind of Airport in The Miracle Of Trauma released via Amen Records

, 6 October 2017
sound

“Please don’t fall into the regulatory trap of believing self care can only happen through routine and capitalist pursuits,” writes Miranda Pharis of Airport, in a personal statement on debut album, The Miracle Of Trauma, released via Vienna’s Amen Records on October 6.

Airport, The Miracle Of Trauma (2017). Album artwork by Stephen A. Mayer. Courtesy Amen Records, Vienna.

Premiering and streaming exclusively on AQNB today, the record is described by the artist as a series of ’empathy drills,’ where 10 tracks flow in and out of each other in a delirious journey of emotional switches. The vocals of Olivia R. Sullivan are a calming presence in the collisions of a melancholy piano, violent gun samples, prerecorded crashes. Accompanying art work by Stephen A. Mayer goes some way in reflecting the uncanny chaos of Airport’s sound, disjointed and suspended somewhere between beauty and contamination; slick CGI renderings of what looks like Disney’s Princess Elsa from Frozen in bed with a neck brace, the indiscernible innards of a bisected bird carcass strung up like a violin, an album cover featuring what might be a rendering of a dried llama foetus talisman.

Intended “as much to comfort and guide as to vent and scream into the void,” the 28-year-old producer says the music of The Miracle Of Trauma is “almost a diary dictated by losing all creature comforts over and over.” Displaced four times during the recording of the album, Pharis here shares the experience of becoming “reduced to what mainstream society sees as ‘nothing’ one or more times.”**

Airport, The Miracle Of Trauma (2017). Album artwork by Stephen A. Mayer. Courtesy Amen Records, Vienna.

TRACK LISTING:

1. Wooden Poppy Armour
2. Dress Lake
3. It’s You
4. Whitewater
5. I Want To Literally, Like, Shoot My Father
6. Egg 
7. Pam, From The Office, Crying
8. Sledge Wings
9 Windfall III
10. Ray of Light

Airport’s The Miracle Of Trauma album is released via Vienna’s Amen Records on October 15, 2017.