London based artist Aura Satz’s latest work is an experimental documentary zooming in on sirens – from their history in various mythologies to their use as tools for defence and their current role in climate and nuclear disasters.

The film’s depictions of siren sites across the world is overlaid by musical contributions from over 20 collaborators including renowned artists such as Evelyn Glennie, FUJI|||||||||||TA, Sarah Davachi, David Toop, Moor Mother, Raven Chacon, Elaine Mitchener, Debit, and Kode9, among many others.

All of these artists’ personal histories are dotted with very diverse and different experiences of sirens. For Elaine Mitchener and David Toop, who grew up in and around London hearing stories of the Second World War, the siren loomed large over their childhoods. In his work, Raven Chacon encountered the siren as a weapon used against the Standing Rock water protectors and indigenous people at the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests in the US in 2016 and 2017. For Evelyn Glennie, who has been profoundly deaf since age 12, sirens must be reimagined outside of the auditory senses.

In anticipation of the UK debut of Preemptive Listening at Tate Modern, featuring Chacon, Glennie, Mitchener, and Toop, we caught up with the artists to discuss the role of sirens in modern life and how they developed their siren songs for the film.

Caroline Whiteley: Congratulations on this impressive and ambitious film. I wondered if you could start by talking about how you came to the topic of sirens.

Aura Satz: I have made a few different projects that looked at sound signals and actually I had already collaborated with Elaine and with David on the kind of constellation of themes that connect to the siren. But on a very personal level, it felt like it was my internal soundtrack. I was trying to find a way to both confront it and materialise it, but also reimagine it with different people.

Some of the collaborators that you've worked with on the film had already worked with sirens in their work in some ways. Raven, for example, your [piece] Chorale uses boat signals. Can you tell us about that?

Raven Chacon: I’ve worked with speakers that are either sirens or units used under the guise of addressing the public, but are really more for crowd dispersal. So, the long range acoustic devices (LRAD) are one of those kinds of weapons that I’ve used in some of my work. That was the first siren, if you will, that I encountered as a potential instrument.

[I didn’t] encounter it sonically at Standing Rock, but it was one of the reasons I went, because I understood that those were being used and brought out to discourage the water protectors and indigenous people from gathering at that site. Eventually I was able to use that in an artwork when I was a member of Postcommodity in a piece called The Ears Between Worlds Are Always Speaking (2017), where we appropriated that weapon and turned it back into an instrument to relay the stories of migration that were happening both on the shores of Athens, Greece, but also in the US/Mexico border lands.

That led to some other work around horns, and this work Chorale, which was written for four to eight ships in a harbour [in Norway]. The idea there was thinking of the encroachment of not only those boats, but also their roles in commerce and tourism, and in other kinds of economies. Because of the loudness of the horns, it became a performance for the entire city to witness.

Something that is also quite present in the film and in reflections on sirens is how ubiquitous they really are.

Elaine Mitchener: Being born and raised in London, I grew up hearing about sirens during World War II, but not really experiencing what that could feel like. As a child, I could only imagine it.

Watching the film again and seeing the way that sirens are used in society, I was reminded of a time in Venice when I was awoken in the middle of the night by a siren. I thought it was the end of the world, I just had never heard a siren that loud before. But it was a warning about the acqua alta to say that there would be floods.

[In that moment] I didn’t know how to act, and what to do, and it was interesting hearing in the film about taking the siren sound and really reframing how we respond to it.

Evelyn Glennie: For me, sirens have all always been about every aspect of daily life. Being brought up on a farm, the seasons were a siren in regards to how you might treat the livestock or treat the arable land and so on – it was something that nature created. As I went through my teen years, silence was all about vibration.

It was a kind of sustained [feeling] that came through the body but also the visual aspects, like a fire alarm or a door flashing doorbell. When one sense is redefined, the other senses are magnified.

Every day your senses are picking up on so-called alarms. We have a visualisation of an alarm, that it’s an object and that it immediately alerts us to something. But I think that we need to be paying attention to [our bodies] a lot more. It’s an alarm that kind of asks us to converse with ourselves internally, asks us to build bridges with other people to act as a support system to preempt situations and so on.

One of your contributions, Evelyn, accompanies [an image of] volcanoes through drums. Were you aware of what clip or what kind of scene your composition would be placed with?

Evelyn Glennie: No, I didn’t know how the soundscapes may be used and I quite enjoyed the fact that it would be an open kind of landscape.

Aura Satz: When I was commissioning [the sound works] I asked people to write something about the ideas behind their composition. Evelyn talked about a kind of vibratory understanding of listening, away from the focus on the auditory but listening through the haptic. That really informed the film because depending on different levels of hearing, you would hear or feel [the siren]. But there would be a kind of percussive rhythm to it.

Evelyn Glennie: We always think of alarms as having to address a lot of people all at once. But actually, an alarm could be something that is quite personal. This film has also made me really think about how alarms could perhaps influence architecture.

I’m more familiar with this, but a lot of designs of buildings for schools for the deaf, for example, have corners that are smooth. They’re curved as opposed to angular because when you have this kind of shape, and someone comes around the corner, it can absolutely spook somebody who is not necessarily hearing the footsteps. A curved wall allows for time, it’s this balance between something that is immediate, and something that can bring all of our senses together.

Aura has previously talked about how she instructed the musicians to “release the siren from its history”. Do any of you remember having those kinds of conversations?

David Toop: Aura and I gave a lecture performance together some years ago, so I had a real sense of this project developing and the interest that grew up around the subject – I wrote about sirens in my fourth book Haunted Weather.

I grew up in the 1950s, very near to a place that was manufacturing and researching armaments. There was a certain amount of top secret work going on there and obviously this place had been a target for German bombers during the Second World War. Growing up at that time, everybody talked incessantly and obsessively about the war. Those memories are still very powerful for people, so my parents and my grandparents would go over and over these incidents of near death scenarios during the Blitz.

I heard sirens on a regular basis [as a child] because by that point they were being used as signals to signal lunchtime, the end of the day and so on. They were used for innocuous purposes, but they still had the atmosphere of dread and threats about them, even though I was too young to know what it was like to hear rockets coming from Germany, to hear bombs falling and explosions. But I was very conscious of this aspect of sirens, it really contributed to my listening sense.

When I started improvising in the early 1970s, one of the instruments we would use were these blown sirens. This rising and falling, and the sense of threat and danger turned into something completely different was very much a part of my formative years. In that sense the conversation with Aura really resonated with me on many levels.

I’m curious about how you approached the use of electronics in combination with the siren as an object.

David Toop: Aura and I spoke [about this project] early on, and I [saw] various images of these scenes that were both dystopian and incredibly seductive. I found that very interesting – these very haunting images of smoke and factory scenes that were beautiful images [but also carried] the sense of inbuilt destruction. That to me relates quite closely to the possibilities of electronics as a use for sound. It’s possible to make very beautiful sounds with electronics, but in fact, I’m much happier using instruments that you might call compostable. I think what I was trying to do was to capture some of that guilty pleasure of enjoying the beauty of these terrifying images and at the same time using sounds that were extremely harsh and abrasive.

The electronic composition does kind of imitate the crackling of the fire.

David Toop: [In one of my earlier experimentations] I was doing a thing at the time related to making flutes. I was splitting bamboo apart length wise – quite a dangerous thing to do, you can hurt yourself seriously.

I was having to do it with gloves, so there was an inbuilt danger to this activity, a real drama to the way the sounds that were made, as the fibres were gradually pulled apart.

I was conscious of this idea that in ancient China, people threw bamboo on the fire to create explosions and that was considered one of the origins of the invention of gunpowder. That’s a kind of sidestory, but it’s related to this idea of noises as danger and threat.

As the bamboo is pulled apart you will get this incredible tension of the last fibres gradually disengaging and there’s something really visceral about it, almost like tearing your body apart. I mean, I’ve never actually tore a body apart as a vegan, but what you would imagine from this activity.

Elaine Mitchener: Talking about compostable things, as in our own bodies. In my composition, I wanted to try and sound less human with [my voice]. There’s the siren in Greek mythology of course, which is also connected to the sea. I was very happy with the image that you placed with it.

Aura Satz: To me, Elaine’s incredibly beautiful voice and whistle piece immediately invoked this landscape that is mythological, but also it made me think of refugees or someone far at sea on a boat, trying to be heard and calling out for help. And then almost kind of metamorphosing into this other being, becoming something no longer human. All those things that you’ve just said were evoked in the sound.

Did you find that working on this film you approached things very differently than how you approach your other artistic practices?

Aura Satz: The compositions that came my way made me listen differently and think differently. One of the bits that’s really powerful is a piece of Raven’s in the middle of the film, a preexisting work that, with Raven’s kind permission, used in this context.

It’s almost like this alluring sound that draws you in but then it also has this pitch that is kind of numbing, and it enacts a form of alarm fatigue which is a thread throughout the film.

These are the solar oscillators that you use, Raven?

Raven Chacon: That was the sound of an installation that I had made back in 2012 called Singing Toward The Wind Now / Singing Toward The Sun Now.

It’s four sculptures, two of them are solar powered oscillators, which sing at this very high pitch when the sun is out. If it’s cloudy the pitch kind of droops and the other two sculptures or beings are wind harps. All of them are up on the hill taking readings from the sun and the wind. In the film, this is paired with this kind of beacon or something that's spinning but there’s also a conversation about mental health. Even though it’s a very high pitched sound and a lot of work I used to do includes whistles and other kinds of high pitched frequencies, it wasn't intended to be this kind of alarm.

I thought it was really interesting that Aura paired it with [a clip that conveys] watching over another’s health or monitoring. This aligns with another instrument that I use, which is this bone muscle. To think that that could be used in a way of healing was putting things together for me to see this within the film, and I'm happy that it got paired in that way instead of seeing something to cause tension or fear.

Evelyn Glennie: This whole project needed a lot of reflection, and a lot of inner listening as regards to perhaps your first experiences with sirens or what we imagine a siren to be. I think especially now we’re very conscious as regards to protection of hearing, how much we’re listening to how we're listening, the devices that we’re listening to.

What is actually happening in the human body, the engine, you know, that we all manipulate every day? There are just so many questions to this. It’s just a fascinating thing.

David Toop: Having been involved in these conversations early on, about the subject I was conscious that it was a steadily growing web of a project. It seems to get bigger, more diverse and include more interesting people. In a sense, it exemplified this kind of collective action.

When it came to making music for the film, I certainly felt conscious that I would be one of many who was making music for the film. Those of us who are improvisors are very conscious that collective music making is a very difficult thing, it raises important political questions of how we can work together, maybe even if we don’t always share the same beliefs, or ideals or ideas and how we can make something constructive. Something that is many voices at the same time as one voice.

Preemptive Listening will be screened at Tate Modern on 25 April. On 26 April, the Tate Modern is hosting a conversation between Evelyn Glennie and Aura Satz, as well as a performance by Elaine Mitchener and David Toop. Raven Chacon will perform on 27 April.

Wire subscribers can read Aura Satz’s Epiphanies feature in The Wire 482 and via the online library.