Fans of Erik Satie are probably aware of his thoughts on musique d’ameublement or musique d’mueble. Furnishing or furniture music. Funny name for a nice idea. Satie thought that music didn’t have to exist only as a focal point, a center of attention, but that it could also have a life as an environmental element. Something like maybe a painting, a color, an architectural embellishment. All elements that together make up the environment and contribute to the tone of your experience. He saw no reason that music shouldn’t be able to exist and contribute in the same way. 

This idea was later taken up by John Cage, who referred to it as minimalist background music. He saw it as an opportunity for experimental and avant-garde composers.  Still later Brian Eno echoed this idea with his ambient works, Music for Airports being a great example. Cage’s identification of an opportunity for avant-garde and experimental composers should be a cue for artists who work with the moving image but who are trying to move past the cultures/aesthetics of film and television. This point is the reason I’m writing this.

With the tech developments in screens and LEDs we’ve finally arrived at a point where pretty much any surface can be a screen. Any surface can be a host for a new form of cinema, one more in tune with Satie’s musical furniture. The challenge for those intrigued by this idea will be to imagine cinema free from the constraints of its past definitions. To conceive of the possibilities of something new. Something different. This will be a cinema that is no longer bound to the models defined by the theatre and the playwright, built around characters and plots and tuned for entertainment. It will be a more abstract cinema. One concerned more with the image itself and its possibilities in tone, mood, rhythm, and color. Cinema as meditation, as design, as light, as music. A cinema free from the need to be center of attention. Free from the need to entertain.