James Murphy Partners With Heineken for Subway Turnstile Music Project, MTA Denies It Will Happen

James Murphy Partners With Heineken for Subway Turnstile Music Project, MTA Denies It Will Happen

Back in 2013, LCD Soundsystem‘s James Murphy announced his dream of making the turnstiles at New York City subway stations produce sound. Then, last year, he previewed a snippet of what that music might sound like. Now, Murphy has announced an official partnership with Heineken to make the plan a reality (via Stereogum). Below, you can watch a promo video for the project, which they are calling Subway Symphony. Their aim is to have “new turnstile notes installed in our first station” by the end of the summer. 

In a press release, Murphy discussed his intentions:

New York City is a beautiful, one-of-a-kind place, and the people who are willing to do what it takes to live here – deal with the crowds and the commotion and the noise – deserve a little sonic gift like this. I want to turn the cacophony of the subway into unique pieces of music. It might seem like a small thing, but that’s exactly the point. This is such an easy way to make this great place I call home even greater.

However, Gothamist secured a pretty firm denial from the MTA, the latest in their attempts to discourage Murphy:

We have heard from him, and as we’ve told him many times, we cannot do it. The tones are an ADA element for the visually impaired, and we won’t mess with them—much less take turnstiles out of service and risk disabling them for an art project. (It would be a very cool project, don’t get me wrong, but we can’t mess with turnstiles that handle 6 million customers a day for it.)

The MTA’s spokesperson also said, “As a condition of filming in the subway, we made them acknowledge that we can’t and won’t do it.”

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