Red Light, Greyfield (2023)

higher order ambisonics
listen on bandcamp

Red Light, Greyfield is an imaginary landscape in which alarms sound in unoccupied spaces or spaces under no immediate threat. Source material for the work consists of recordings made around Oslo, notably the air raid sirens heard twice a year throughout the city. These are integrated with samples collected from a chaotic analog synthesizer, and digital synthesis textures from wave terrain, glisson, and asynchronous granular techniques.

The feeling of the work is inspired by two recurring sensations: the Oslo skyline when it takes the form of distant red lights on tower cranes poking through grey skies, and the air raid sirens heard from different locations in the city. From the right vantage point, the sirens sound and pause in staggered polyphony, revealing a diversity of distant echoic spaces melting together from the listener’s position. From a close perspective, the sirens are ear-shattering, distorted, breaking apart from dissonance and environmental interference. It is a unique and beautiful spatial audio experience, immersive and invasive in scale. Both perspectives are presented in the work – distant at the beginning and close at the end. The slow-burn introductory soundscape gives way over a 4+ minute period to a shrieking wall-of-sound which subsumes all but the echo of sirens.