FLIGHT RECORDER DO NOT OPEN by Hali Palombo

https://halipalombo.bandcamp.com/album/flight-recorder-do-not-open

Genre: Experimental

Rating: 5/5

released on bandcamp October 24, 2021

Conceptually this is pretty disturbing right from the get. An album composed entirely of black box recordings of aviation catastrophes. Although I expected it to be more in your face content-wise it turns out not to be very clear what’s being sampled save the title and description. Palombo chooses siding with the aesthetic over the blatantly exploitative. The bereaved aren’t likely to identify these specific final moments. I remember once going down the rabbit hole of listening to extraordinarily stoic, calm, and professional pilots narrate their way to certain death in the trademark unflappable Chuck Yeager drawl. Side note: If you haven’t read The Right Stuff I couldn’t recommend more highly that you rectify that. Anyway, Palombo doesn’t take us rubbernecking our way into the horror. Instead she reinterprets it in her own peculiar way. I do have a reference point but it’s so obscure it’s probably not going to help but it’s such a fantastic record I’ll name drop it anyway: Vinyl by Gum.

“All sounds on this record were made from other records – scratched, looped, or untouched. No tapes, no samples.
Recorded winter 1987.

Could only find two tracks of this masterpiece online and that’s one of them.

Anyway, I’ve been in two pretty serious in flight close calls and it’s got to be the most oh fuck of all oh fucks in my life. An engine blowing out over the Atlantic and a bouncy aborted take off due to a blown tire. Once I was just reading a book about a plane crash and triggered myself in the air (I thought I was cooler than that) and another time, shortly after 9/11 they somehow saw fit to show The Incredible Hulk knocking helicopters out of the sky on like twenty different unignorable screens. I guess they were trying to give me a fucking heart attack. In retrospect that sounds pretty weak sauce on my part but ffs I was trying to relax. Recently, I took my first flight sober in my adult life. It wasn’t that bad but I drove home anyway.