“A Choir of Sirens” explores and decomposes salient sonic features common to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Wilhelmsburg, Hamburg, refashioning them into something recognizable but intriguingly altered. The piece asks the listener to re-experience the cities' sonic environments, revealing familiar elements in a new light as surprisingly harmonious, discordant, or somewhere in between. Birds and people transform into strange wild creatures, rain attacks in spatters, passing drones boil into an encompassing swarm, and the traffic and sirens of both cities eventually meld into an uneasily beautiful and overwhelming HORN-GASM (!!!). Of course, sirens also act as warning signals of impending danger, and we fail to heed them at our own peril.
“A Choir of Sirens” was written for Phase 2 of The Wil(helms|liams)burg project, AKA W-Burg, a 2017/2018 cross-continental collaboration between composers in Hamburg, Germany, and Brooklyn, NY. The source recordings for this piece were gathered in 2017 in both locations, and it premiered at the 48h Wilhelmsburg/blurred edges festival in Hamburg on June 9, 2018.
More information on the project:
http://w-burg.com/
Festivals:
http://musikvondenelbinseln.de/48h
http://www.vamh.de/index.php?what=blurred_edges&year=2018&gig=3562
