1. Please explain the concept of the Siren, technology and your role in the live performance.

 

Siren emerged out of a creative research process and almost as a by product of what I was working towards. In 2000 I was making a new installation performance for the top floor of a disused textile mill in England. My intention was to create a series of sound machines that evoked a sense of industrial processes and the idea of spinning with sound. The original intention was to use the digital information generated by playing a MIDI Theremin to activate electro-mechanical devices. I would control an orchestra of sound machines by playing the invisible magnetic field that surrounds the Theremin. Due to technical problems I was unable to use the Theremin to activate the machines at this time and had to move around the installation controlling them manually. (I should note that I have recently achieved my goal and created a piece from this original idea (Force Field premiered at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London in November 2007). I became interested in the performative nature of moving around the installation operating and manipulating the machinery by hand. Looking back on the piece, which was called The Theremin Lesson, it was the five spinning sirens that I used during the performance that interested me most. This developed through various iterations to become the work Siren with up to thirty sirens.

 

The performer’s role is crucial to the way the piece is perceived. The performers activate and control the work; they are skilled operators both musically and technically, dressed in protective grey felt suits that signify them as engaged in an act of work. Their persona is serious and focused; they have an actual job to do, and one that requires a high level of musical skill (being able to tune the tones to specific pitches in a complex sound environment) and a degree of manual dexterity. There is no acting in Siren, yet the performers play a part. When the audience experience Siren their attention is taken first by the actions of the performers who control and operate the machines, but then gradually transfers to the spectacle of sound and light as the light levels reduce and the swarm red LEDs spinning in space becomes the compelling image.

 

2. What kind of sound the Siren produces and where does the inspiration for it come form?

 

The distinctive sound of Siren comes from the fact that the sirens spin. The sound itself is generated by a very simple sound generating electronic circuit, one of the simplest tone generators possible to make. I am continually frustrated by the inaccessibility of contemporary electronic equipment. We are confronted by little black boxes and computers that can do amazing things, but the workings of these devices are closed and inaccessible to us. We are consigned to using the products of someone else’s programming skills. In making this simple siren circuit I was trying to regain some control of the means of production of the sound. In this way I am continually inspired by the early pioneers of electronic music who had to be continually inventive with the means of production because once you had created / discovered your new electrically generated sound you had to devise a way of controlling it.

 

In Siren this simple saw tooth wave can be tuned to a discrete pitch by the performers who are working to a predetermined scale or mode, usually the Aeolian mode. Each arm of the spinning siren has a double oscillator enabling a different note to be sent to each of the two loudspeakers. Once the arms begin to rotate the speed of rotation creates a Doppler effect with a slight rising and lowering of the pitch as the spinning arm comes towards and away from the listener’s perspective. This modulation of the note creates a warmth in the tone that is not there when the pitch is static. This is then multiplied by up to thirty rotating siren arms, each with two notes making up to sixty different notes, and creating a rich, thrumming, choral texture of modulating notes, like a giant oscillating chord. The listener, however, is able to move between hearing the textural wash of sound and then, by moving closer to the siren arms, to hear the pulsing of the individual notes as they whistle past them.

 

3. Is there a ‘composition’ you follow during the live performance?

 

The composition is partly determined by practical considerations and partly by the performance context. Siren can be presented as an automatic installation that an audience can ‘dip into and out of’. While this has some advantages I am most interested by the live context. The duration of the composition is important because it takes an audience through a carefully shaped experience which moves from the meticulous tuning of the individual notes to the increase in the speed of rotation and then slowly back down to silence. The live context also places the performers in relationship to the machines and their movement. For me this is probably the most interesting part of the piece.

 

The composition takes the audience, over a period of about forty minutes, through a process that moves from analytical understanding to a more open, non literal experience of moving sound and light.

 

4. Why is the work titled Siren?

 

I called an early version of the piece Choir because the sound has such a choral quality. The piece took on the name Siren when I made an installation at a former US air force base in North Oxfordshire. For the audience this was an experience outside of the normal conventions of attending an art gallery, theatre or concert. Once through the razor-wired checkpoint, the audience faced a two-mile drive into the heart of this bleak and desolate ex-cold war territory. The airfield, once home to a fleet of US jet bombers, now lies half empty, the fifty or more huge, curved, bomb-proof concrete hangers providing a haunting reminder of the site’s history.

The work was called Siren because I liked the sense of danger that the word conveys, together with the idea of the siren call, luring people towards it. In Hanger 3022, the sirens had inevitable echoes of the site’s history, but for me the work has an elegiac quality. The sound of my sirens is more like an ethereal choir rather than the warning air raid tones you expect from the word “siren”.

 

5. What is sound for you and what kind of sound devices are you interested in?

 

Sound is a way of describing a spectrum of sonic activity that ranges from noise to music. What constitutes noise and what constitutes music are questions that fascinate me. I can remember playing a CD of some obscure ‘noise’ while cooking tea in the kitchen and when my son came in he remarked how funny it would be if someone thought that ‘this noise’ could be music.

Sound art is also a spectrum of activity that ranges from artists who work with sound as the carrier of meaning to composers who are exploring sound as a palate for composition. My own interest comes as someone who is both a composer and an artist. I am interested in both the musicality of noise and in the physical manipulation of materials. I like to make things, to shape and create visual and sonic experiences for an audience. So the machines and devices I make serve different functions. On one hand I want them to make a sound that I can work with both musically and compositionally, but also I want these devices to correspond to my own visual, artistic aesthetic principles and ideas in order to create a cohesive experience for an audience.

 

6. You mostly work with outdated technology. Where does this fascination come from?

 

All technology is outdated the moment it leaves the factory shelf because in that way we will always be persuaded to buy the next new thing. The next new thing arrives before we have had time to understand the last new thing and it is partly in response to our restless consumerism and need for the latest gadget that I want to explore the untapped potential of the ‘outmoded’.

 

I work with a vision of the future as if imagined from sometime in the past where a series of different decisions have been made. I am fascinated by the idea of what we experience as ‘cutting edge’ and how incredibly quickly the technology we see as cutting edge seems blunt and crude. Seen at the time Victorian invention was cutting edge, the 1950’s computers the size of small rooms were cutting edge, and the CD player was, only 25 years ago, cutting edge. Today, magnetic tape is almost obsolete, CDs will be before long, connecting computers with cables is almost prehistoric, and the internet was unimaginable when CD’s were the new thing. Tomorrow something else will be the new thing. In the mean time I can play with this mountain of redundancy. I can take things apart and rewire them, I can learn to build simple electronic devices. The fascination comes from a childlike interest in science. What is magnetism? How does magnetism work? You turn on a radio and sound comes out, transmitted through the Ether. We open our eyes and we see visible light, part of the same electromagnetic spectrum as radio waves. Our bodies have evolved to receive electromagnetic light radiation, but we need to utilise a simple set of electronic components to receive radio waves. Electricity is the thing. Our world, our modern world is an electric world. We are dependent on the movement of electrons through a conductive material.

 

I have no problem with using digital technology, I seek to fuse the use of digital with analogue because each can do and bring different things to a given situation.