Okay, this is a strange one. 932 Sirens is exactly what it suggests, audio assembled from material drawn from ‘Large-Scale Audio Dataset for Emergency Vehicle Sirens and Road Noises’ by Muhammad Usaid, Muhammad Asif, Tabarka Rajab, Samreen Hussain, Sheikh Muhammad Munaf, and Sarwar Wasi. For the artist, Brisbane based MJ O’Neill, it’s an attempt to appropriately acknowledge the genocide of Palestine, as well as a reflection on the chaos of our world and perpetual sense that its all just about to fall apart. O’Neill has previously worked in everything from rave to more club influenced sounds, to electro percussion, mutant hip hop, and noise, releasing most of her music twice a year packaged together on bandcamp.
This is what she has to say about this piece:
“Originally, this was all that I was going to do with the big pile of siren recordings I found. I just wanted to know what they would all sound like if you played them all at once. But, trying to assemble a 900+ layered track kept crashing my computer. So, I came up with a compromise. It’s ten or so layers, with each layer cycling through 100 different recordings in sequence. (I figured out the 900+ layers eventually, though, don’t worry.) I thought of it like the sirens singing in a choir and doing a canon or like a string quartet made out of sirens. Just an endless cascade of swirling emergencies. Even now, I still hear new sounds in the spirals.”
932 Sirens will be released August 23rd 2024 via a Guide To Saints/Room40. You can find it here.
Photo credit – Marek Rigelsk
