Solstice Rituals by Hearing Sirens

"These songs have a practical use," Gem Ash, lead singer and driving force behind Hearing Sirens, is keen to stress. "They are the product of a ritual, and they have ritualistic purpose". The live recordings at the heart of these tracks were recorded on the summer solstice in 2023, at Ambition's Graveyard, Norwich. "We had a rug laid out, with a whole host of instruments and noisemaking devices, and microphones set up to capture the space. We lit some incense, sat quietly for a while, and then began to develop these miniature, repeated figures. As the sun reached its zenith, we rang a bell and kept playing".

These two multi-tracked ritual performances would go on to become the foundation for this record. "I spent about a year just listening to the recordings, growing familiar with the shape of them. Tiny variations in the intensity and speed, which I began to memorise. Over time, a barely noticeable structure emerged, which I teased out and emphasised". Through the addition of percussion, bass, vocals, piano and more, including sculpted TV static captured through electromagnetic signal detectors by pre-eminent soundweaver Charlotte Arculus, these two looping, eliptical meditations became sprawling sonic landscapes, each with a transformative power.

"These tracks have the power to carry you on a journey, if you let them. They do what they say they do; the first one is an invocation, or a litany perhaps, to banish anxiety, starting as it does in a kind of resigned melancholy, which moves through a space of confidence and then blissful acceptance, into total oblivion. It's a good morning listen. The second track is more mysterious, more aligned with the darkness. It's good at 3am, when nobody else is awake, or perhaps you're with people who are coming down at the end of a long night and falling asleep as the sun comes up. It's a cleansing and reworking of the difficult complexities in life, the garbled noise of crossed wires, and realigning it with the light".

It's this track that contains Gem's favourite moment, and perhaps the moment that defines the project: "Towards the end, Chris [Dowding, trumpet-player and improviser who works closely with Ash and Arculus in many projects] vaults this stunning, hopeful trumpet line into the middle of things, and it's like a beam of golden light shooting through the dawn, heralding hope. And it loops and gets folded in on itself over and over again, like getting kneaded into the fabric of the reality of the track, like that hope is getting worked into everything."

At this moment, the previously unintelligible vocals come into focus and achieve total clarity - even if the clear thought itself is mourning a loss of information. The lyrics for this whole project were themselves borne from improvisation, around the solstice one year on from the first session. "There were many days spent laying in the study at Ambition's Graveyard, with the sun falling on my closed eyes and a microphone positioned above my head, basically hypnotising myself into trance-like states, improvising vocals over these looped tracks, waiting for things to fall into place". What emerged clarified the desire and intent of these tracks for Gem. "This whole process has been one of kind of letting the tracks write themselves, allowing them to emerge in whatever way felt natural to them. in this way, they really are the product of ritual, and carry that energy for anyone who engages with them."

On the second solstice after their conception, after two years of gentle divination and exegesis, these pieces are ready to be put into the world. "I hope people have a working relationship with these pieces of music, for meditation, or setting a mood, or particularly for falling asleep to. Mixing these tracks was so difficult, because they're so sprawling and glacial at points that I found myself constantly falling asleep before I could get to the point I was trying to work on... This whole album is kind of like sleep music for ADHD people. There's enough going on that if you pay attention to it it's consistently engaging, but they go round and round in a way that gradually lulls you to sleep if you let it".

However you choose to listen to these tracks, Hearing Sirens hope they bring the healing power of summer light to your mind, body and soul.