Pigeon Spins Featuring an Interview with Siren Section

Separation Team is Siren Section’s first full-length album in over eight years, shaped over four years of writing and production. The record combines post-punk, shoegaze, and glitch-driven electronics into an emotionally dense, immersive experience.

Interview with Siren Section

(•)> What made this the right moment to release your first full length album in over eight years?

I think we’d originally just settled into unofficially going on hiatus, which sort of became indefinite. For a while, we weren’t sure if there was going to be room for us to keep the project going, and as more time went on, it started to feel more and more daunting to attempt to get the ball rolling again.

Then I had some health issues, and was hospitalized… it was all really a jolt for me, and it was touch-and-go for a bit there. I felt sort of destroyed after the whole experience, but with the rehab process, it started to feel like a chance to turn the page on something, which I guess led to the notion of us reforming SIREN/SECTION//… and for me personally, it was part of putting my head back together.

We started with TIMEGHOST, and it was built from there. The central thing that really guided it at that point was that it needed to be ambitious. I mean, it could have been a lot shorter, or longer even, but it needed to really “go for it.” We obsessed over it, completely poured ourselves into it, and roughly four years later, we had the album. We didn’t expect it to take that long, but it was a long process of putting it all back together, getting back into the mode of writing songs, and for me personally, really just re-orienting myself. Calibrating.

(•)> How did the four year writing and production process shape the emotional tone of Separation Team?

We got the sketch of what became the central building blocks for it fairly quickly. I didn’t actually expect us to be making something as personal and emotionally crazy, but it all sort of felt natural once the notes came together. Weirdly, I came at the whole thing intending to be emotionally distant at first. That felt safer. Maybe that’s part of what guided the framing with the grandiose proclamations, religious invocations, vocoder prophecy… not cosplay, but theater for sure… and then, as the project dragged on, that defensive layer sort of broke apart.

Glass Cannon was a turning point for me personally, where it became almost surprising that we were going there, with something that vulnerable. It felt right, though; sort of necessary and obvious even. I feel like once we had that song, we understood what we were actually saying with this, and it really started to feel like something of a “concept album.”

(•)> What does the album title Separation Team represent for you conceptually?

It ties to a shifting meaning, but for me, the separation team is cohabited isolation… throwing yourself fully, completely into something, and cutting yourself off so totally from everything else that you become something new… and it’s put in the context of love, so it could be a relationship, but it could be our personal passions, the things that drive us, or what we dedicate ourselves to, or our vice and addictions… how they all have the potential to destroy you if you hold on too tight.

It shows up as a lyric in the song SOLIDARITY, and then comes back in RITUAL, and the tone is flipped… in SOLIDARITY it’s hopeful and optimistic, and in RITUAL it’s desperate and kind of broken.

(•)> How do post punk, shoegaze, and glitch driven electronics coexist in your creative process?

We started working on music together over twenty years ago, but that was always a through line with everything… we loved distortion and electronic percussion. We’ve always been drawn to the sound of heavier shoegaze, the way it takes this atmospheric approach to fuzz, blurs the line with ambient music. We were always really drawn to atmosphere and texture, maybe originally more than notes.

When we reformed as a duo, it felt natural to align it with post punk for a genre tag… I guess it’s dark music. Moody for sure. We wear some of those influences on our sleeve probably. It’s a broad genre, and it has room for music with electronic dance-infused rock.

It’s the most fun to basically half write a song idea without a solid idea of direction and then let it change. Or it can also be great to try to push a song in a different direction on purpose.

(•)> Can you explain what glitchgaze means to you as both a sound and an aesthetic?

I guess it’s just our way of saying that we’re an electronic rock band, in our own way. We’ve always had some difficulty with answering the “what genre is it” question. When we first started playing together in Jinsai, people would tell us how much we needed a drummer. Every show we played, someone would say it. And that kind of always furthered my resolve that I didn’t want a drummer. Not that we were against live drumming. There are live drums on a few of the songs on the album. But to us, it made sense to be something different. I guess we’ve always wanted to hold to the distinction that we’re more of an electronic band with guitars than a rock band with electronics.

The glitch aspect of our music feels just tied to the percussion I’ve loved from IDM/braindance, and offshoots, like breakcore or glitch hop. I probably pull a lot from when I used to make psychedelic trance… there’s a lot of glitching that goes into the rhythm there.

For the aesthetic, it just clicked… it carries decay, fragility of memory, nostalgia, ghosts in the machines… I feel like those concepts resonate with our music.

(•)> How do you balance dense immersive textures with accessibility and melody?

We didn’t use to… we tried!

But maybe what guided this record more was the way I let the vocal melodies sort of incubate and guide the songwriting while I’d produce the scaffolding. I’d have a concept of how the melody would go, and I’d get it in my head when I’d walk my dog, do routine things… sometimes it would start with a looping line in my head, and then I could flesh it out at the piano, but it felt like it started around these clear looping melodies, tied to words, sure, and we just tried to reinforce that; guide the atmosphere so it doesn’t hijack the loop in my head. Just walk down the street with Gizmo, humming “our love is Armageddon.”

Some of those headloops had to keep going on for years, just imagining how it would all eventually click into place and kind of hoping for the best. Kind of absurd, in hindsight.

(•)> Many of your songs explore existential sadness. Why does that theme continue to resonate with you?

I’d like to think that our music is deceptively optimistic. We very much want to see the good guys win. You also know they often don’t. That’s reality, and I’d like to think our music is based in reality, or that it’s at least sincere.

On paper, thematically, I guess we could seem a little bleak. We’re not going to win the Grammy for Happiest Album of the Year, but I’d like to think we dig up something kind of beautiful in the ugliness of it all, the grim topics we kick around.

We’re definitely looking for a sort of silver lining, and I’d like to think that carries some sort of hopeful tone in our music. But we do tend to explore sad ideas and look at them in warped ways. Sometimes it might be to simply recognize it and confront the things that break our hearts.

(•)> How has your musical relationship evolved after working together for more than twenty years?

At this point, I think we have sort of our own language. I mean that beyond a sort of fluency and familiarity, we’ve got code names and inside jokes that we barely understand at this point. It’s all part of the scenery. We are very familiar with each other’s strengths and weaknesses probably, where we excel, how to push and motivate each other. We can speak really frankly at this point; just say “that sucks,” and we don’t really butt heads.

We know how to pilot the ship. John and I just click musically, and we always have, but it took a while of meandering to figure it out. There’s none of that uncertainty now, really. Just pilot the ship, steer around the obstacles, most of them feeling sorta familiar by this point. Now, when we have time to work together, it’s just go go go, and when the dust settles, there’s a framework for something.

Usually.

It’s always been fun to give up having too strict an idea of what a song should do, as well as try to push songs in different directions that aren’t exactly obvious. Neither of us is trying to go for a strict concept or aesthetic, like “this is our late 80s teenage goth EBM record” or something. Although that sounds fun. It’s nice to allow things to happen; to try out ideas and be surprised.

(•)> What role do visuals and surreal design play in completing the Siren Section world?

We used to do really simple visual projections for our live shows back in the day… just video feedback tunnels, aerial shots of industrial landscapes… we used it more for tone and backdrop.

When we started putting this record together, I started getting more into experimenting with video tools and taking the visual accompaniment more seriously. I learned how to edit in Resolve, and I developed a sort of pipeline for manipulating and glitching out the video loops. I take it more seriously. It’s not something I ever really felt like I had any business getting into in the past, but I’ve kind of fallen in love with it all.

It’s all really coming together, actually, in a way that’s going to completely change how we’re approaching the live show, when we get that up and running. That’s all, really exciting for us.

(•)> How did singles like Glass Cannon and Medicine help set the stage for the full album?

The first impulse was to actually not release any of the songs outside of the context of the record; that doing so would cheapen the full thing, like releasing a chapter of a book out of order. But after years had gone into it and we were still spinning our wheels, we had to put something out… so it felt like we were “real again.”

So we decided to pick a couple of songs, we’d space them out… at the time when we released GLASS CANNON, we naively thought we were much closer to release than we were. That was a personal song for me, and yet it was this weirdly anthemic pop track… so it felt right as a single. It had a sort of verse-chorus structure; it wasn’t too out there, by comparison to some of the ideas we were throwing around.

Also, I guess GLASS CANNON felt like a good litmus test… if people aren’t weirded out by the way the song kind of overshares, then maybe the rest of it will land. It felt like a good entry point.

And also, the song was pretty central to the album for me. It’s a huge turning point in the sequence, where things start to get really dark, and I love the pivot, but I also loved the idea of releasing it outside of that framing… because from my perspective, in the context of the record, it’s a much more tragic song.

MEDICINE made sense to be the next single, really, because it felt like we could fit it neatly into a genre box, and call it “shoegaze,” even though I guess it’s still a little not. But it has the earmarks of the genre, and that felt like a good way to reach out, keep the pulse alive for a bit longer.

I also wanted the other song to be one of the ones John sings, so we’d trade off there.

(•)> In what ways is Separation Team different from your earlier releases?

Well, it’s longer, for starters. We were joking while we were making it that it was turning into our The Wall. I didn’t actually think we were going to make something nearly 80 minutes long, but I did plan for something on the longer side.

It worked as part of the challenge, putting myself back together physically and mentally, the two of us getting the ball rolling again, and then, fuck it, let’s make a double disc concept record, or at least that’s what it evolved into.

Maybe part of that was also a reaction to the trend I’d been noticing… this aversion to songs longer than 4 minutes, and the move towards bands putting out singles instead of albums. The notion of an album being this kind of contained work that’s meant to be experienced as a whole…. I think that might be something we’re getting away from, and it’s a really vital format for expression. But yes, I very much wanted to make “an album,” and not just a collection of songs.

We’d tried to do some ambitious things in the past, but it usually started with an ambitious springboard, into realistic management and execution. Reasonable goals. Here, I feel like we kept shifting the goal posts to keep challenging ourselves, push it further. Figure out a way to make it work.

So this was the first time we actually didn’t just produce the whole thing ourselves at home on our computer. We actually worked with an engineer in an actual studio, and I checked the boxes on doing things “the proper way.” I really wanted to hit some sonic high moments, I guess. That was one of the constant goal posts.

We also worked with Mike Schuppan to engineer the final mix, and he really helped us carry it across the finish line. Some of the songs, after years of chipping away at them…. You start to lose the plot a little bit. I remember at one point, I just couldn’t listen to a couple of the songs anymore. It was torture. And so we brought the mixes to him, and he just heard it sensibly and brought it together. He’s brilliant.

(•)> What do you hope listeners feel or reflect on when experiencing the album from start to finish

I hope they can make it their own. It’s one of the things when I try to explain the meaning behind things, like the meaning of the words “separation team,” I don’t want to deprive anyone of their own reading into it. I would hope there’s something in there that people will recognize.

We get told that our stuff sounds nostalgic, and I like that. I like the idea that we make people reminisce on things, with something bittersweet happening there. Maybe I really hope it resonates with some people in a way that actually helps them when they need it. Like I was saying, I think we’re deceptively optimistic.

(•)> That's all, Folks! Check out  Siren Section on the Pigeon Spins Playlist