We spoke with Siren Section about “Separation Team” and more!

Q: You’ve both been making music together for a long time, so when did Separation Team stop feeling like “the new record we’re working on” and start feeling like this is the album?

JAMES: We started with something ambitious, for sure, but we definitely didn’t go into it set to make an eighty minute concept album. The original cut originally ended up being significantly longer than that, actually.

The album was called Separation Team forever. I think the oldest files on my computer referencing “The Separation Team” go back to 2021. The song Ritual was originally called The Separation Team, and it was a partner track to Solidarity, which had the working title “Separation Team.” So we were kicking something around there.

JOHN: There was a point when we were talking about making two entirely separate albums, with Separation Team being one of them, and the other having a completely different theme, title, mood, and general intention. Each of those records would have been conventional LP length.  

Then we started to care less about time constraints and stopped worrying about  attention spans, or the unfair perception that people somehow don’t have serious attention spans. When it became clear that some songs just wouldn’t fit thematically on Separation Team.  Eventually, hopefully, the other album will arrive in its own way, because those songs are very different, but will be very cool.

Q: This record feels big, but not in a flashy way, more like it slowly pulls you into its world. Were you thinking about sequencing and mood from the start, or did that reveal itself later?

JOHN: Mood, yes.  I think embracing a particular type of unapologetically dramatic mood was intentional from the beginning. Singing in character and the possibility of unreliable narrators were part of the plan. Some of those songs turned out a little different than the original ideas suggested.  

”Ritual” had more of a piano ballad feel originally.  I wanted it to be almost like Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia” with string synths and a simple drum machine and  just a great vocal performance.  I think it ended up somewhere in a New Order happy medium with this distorted vocal and hazier production.  I think it works better that way.

JAMES: I got a bit carried away with the sequencing. Songs were connected to other songs, in my head, even when they weren’t at a stage where I’d say they were finished being written; I’d know where it needed to go and how it would fit together in some general sense.  

Construct was written with the intention of it being the first song on the album, absolutely. It was a “summoning ritual,” a “pact” for the Team. Then I knew it needed to go early on into Solidarity… that was the “opening salvo.” Certain songs absolutely could not come before or after other specific songs, or it wouldn’t function correctly. 

John actually wrote Medicine and Carry Through a while before the real arranging process for this album started, but they fit in perfectly with how things were coming together… but Carry Through had to be at the end, and Medicine had to be early in the record, and it couldn’t come before Solidarity, or that would mess things up. 

I probably got a little carried away, but maybe that’s a good thing? Endless notes. When I look through them, most of it still makes sense to me. John let me run with this insane thing, and he probably kept it grounded in something resembling the real world, He made sure it would make sense to sensible human beings. 

For me, it was more like “well it’s obviously got to be this way, right? That’s obvious.” I had to keep reminding myself that none of this shit was obvious at all, and it probably came across as completely insane in how I was relaying it. I probably got really annoying at times, actually. 

But John and I have worked together forever, so we get each other. We sort of speak our own language when we’re putting ideas together. There’s a lot of trust, both ways. 

Q: There’s a real push-and-pull on the album between beauty and tension. Do you feel like that contrast is something you naturally fall into, or was this record the moment you really leaned into it?

JAMES: There were some moments on this album where we really tried to… “bliss out.” I’m not sure what the word for it should be, but I guess it’s that line between where it starts to sound overwhelming, and where it feels powerful and explosive, and I think if you ride that line there’s something euphoric you can catch there… I think it’s a space you can project almost any complex emotion into, and the song, if it’s doing it right, can support it. 

I love the sound of controlled feedback, where it’s on the verge of collapsing into something awful, but if you balance it right it dances on the edge of that possibility. 

I had a friend say that we have a lot of “celebrational moments” on the record, and I hadn’t thought of it that way, but it made sense that he heard it like that. We do have a thing where we get really major and almost “happy sounding” on top of really sad concepts… and I do think there’s something beautiful in that contrast.  

Or we have something like Minotaur… That is a weird song. Originally it was weirder and glitchier. It felt natural to have these neurotic vocals on top of this beat that oscillates between this frantic dnb thing with distorted chuggy guitars, and then break it into a waltz with calm strings and pads. 

It really did feel like we were riding that line to where it was almost collapsing into unintelligible feedback, and then it swoops in to cushion it with the weirdest tone swap… and I’d like to think that the waltz turn makes use of all the tension that precedes it. The craziness makes the subsequent relief settle in. 

JOHN: I think we’ve always liked the contrast.  Back in the Jinsai days, having ambient interludes was something we loved to do live and did plenty of times on those two records.  Then we’d most likely follow it with more industrial noise and more mechanical beats.  

The interesting thing about this new record is that we basically didn’t lean into dissonance or atonal moments at all.  It is all pretty melodic. So there’s tension, but it creeps up on you in a more surreptitious way than with a wall of dissonant feedback. 

JAMES: Dissonant feedback can be cool too, though. 

Q: I kept thinking about how your songs can feel emotional without always putting the vocals front and center. When you’re building a track, how do you decide what the voice needs to do versus what the sound can say on its own?

JAMES: Musically, I think it’s safe to say we treat the vocal more as “another instrument” than as a clear lead focal point. We’ve always been like that, but with this album we actually brought the vocals more up front than we usually would. I think the lyrics were really important to the songs here, so they had to be discernible. 

JOHN: With this record, there were a lot of times where we were trying to subtly support the vocals and just not get in the way.  “Deer Hunter” is a good example.  James’s vocal and string arrangement were so good that I had to be careful with the bass part and super effected backwards guitar parts so that it didn’t distract, and only supported the mood.  I think we ended up using instrumental parts at the end of a vocal phrase to indicate thoughts that come after the phrase, either from the singer’s perspective or from a listener’s perspective.  That all requires careful editing and cutting.  

JAMES: We also did a lot of experiments with vocoders. I tried some tuner abuse too, but threw all that out… it just had “that autotune sound” that wasn’t right for the doom robot prophet we eventually dialed in… and dialing in the right vocoder stack for each track became a thing. It helped to define these different “personalities” that were emerging between the songs. 

JOHN: Then there’s moments where we’re intentionally contrasting James’s more human voice against the vocoders, and it was a sort of fun blending experiment… see who wins, the robot or the human voice. 

JAMES: By contrast, John’s voice is direct and consistent, and mostly unprocessed on the album, and I think that breaks up the songs with almost bookmark moments. The songs function that way too; almost like a narrator weighing in to assess the story. 

Q: “Flinch” has that kind of track energy where it feels like your body reacts before your brain catches up. Did that song arrive fast, or was it one of those that took forever to get right?

JAMES: A little of both. A lot of the beat was programmed as a faster dark psytrance track… that I was originally working on to give myself distance from the album. It was what I felt I needed, just a complete 180 from everything on the record. And then, listening back, I could hear the vocal part functioning underneath it if I slowed it down, and suddenly it snapped into place. We sat down with John on the MPC and really it just became a process of steering it away from being too obviously attached to the psytrance scaffolding. 

JOHN: That one was one of the last additions and it all came together very quickly.  From James’s other life in AnachraniD… and it was all James’s last minute mixing stage madness that resulted in our throwing it in.  Luckily, it all worked out well.  It’s cool, because it is like having a bit of a Refused “New Noise” or Pink Floyd “On the Run” moment.  It has that, “are you with us?” kind of feel.  Because if you are with us, this is going to be a cool and memorable experience and we’re just as enthusiastic about that sort of thing as you should be.

JAMES: It’s going to be a lot of fun to play that one out live. 

Q: On a record with 19 songs, were there certain tracks that became the emotional anchor points for you while you were making it?

JAMES: For me, probably Glass Cannon, and Marker. Or maybe Deer Hunter, but I hope they’re still removed enough so that people can take whatever they want from them, or put whatever they want into them. I don’t like the idea of a rigid interpretation of it… it was meant to be malleable to interpretation. Even if it means something clearly to me. 

Some of this Means Everything was one of the first songs we tracked vocals for in the studio, and I had a hard time getting through it. It maybe gets more literal than other songs on the album, but it would have felt disingenuous to get more abstract with it. There’s some raw sadness in that song, and it sort of drops the artsy lyricism for something more blunt. It feels for me like it’s cutting the shit entirely. 

But then again, Construct and Carry Through are kind of like bookends to the record, and Five Fifty Five is, in a way, the “epilogue,” and I think it “sums up the book,” more or less.  

JOHN: There was the point where we had the idea to do the “Construct” reprise at the end of “Carry Through.”  That landed in a way that didn’t feel overly clever or too dramatic, despite being almost too obvious.  It just worked well and I didn’t want to overthink it. 

 I sort of wanted to make it more Beach Boys, but it is probably better that it didn’t go that far.  The Wilson brothers are all gone now. It is a sad reality.  Think about that one for a minute.

Q: I’m curious about the title, because Separation Team sounds almost like a breakup phrase, or the name of some secret unit, all at once. Did the title unlock the record for you, or did it only make sense once the songs were done?

JAMES: That’s where I have to let people read what they want into that meaning, if it speaks to them, then that’s what it means… but for me, I’m circling a state of dedication to something (or someone) so complete that it becomes your entire world, and eventually becomes something that mutually erodes and cannibalizes. 

So it could be read that way; as a sort of “tragic break-up album,” if you wanted to. You could see it like Gentlemen or Berlin or something, in that idea. That’s in there, if you wanted to extract that.

But it could be ambitions, or anything all-consuming. It could be a principle, or a vice. If it eventually becomes you, and then turns to consume you, then you’re in the separation team, more or less? Like Gollum and the ring. 

JOHN: What starts as an earnest connection with other people can easily turn sinister before you know it, and then gets darker when it all falls apart.  Inside jokes are good examples. Friendship or kinship or belonging that begins genuine and becomes exclusive and exclusionary and negative is something we can all relate to in some way.

Q: Your sound gets described in a lot of different ways, but “glitchgaze” is one that keeps coming up. Do you actually like having a label for it, or do genre names mostly become useful after the music is already done?

JOHN: We came up with the glitchgaze term ourselves because we thought it was a better thing to say than “electronic rock band” which we are, of course.  But saying “electronic rock band” can mean a lot of different things and none of which sound exactly alike.  

JAMES: We originally made it as a joke, because we’ve always had a hard time telling people what genre we supposedly are. And I hate how that always sounds like a pretentious answer, so we just needed to make up something definitive I guess. 

I liked the whole “glitch hop” tag, and the idea of mixing IDM with hip hop is ostensibly what’s going on there, and that’s in a way similar to how we were combining braindace ideas with shoegaze and post punk concepts, so why not?

Whenever we say “it’s sorta shoegaze,” we’re setting people up for some confusion. We can’t call it industrial, because it clearly isn’t, even if it’s influenced by that music. It’s moody and dark, but it isn’t goth. So “Glitchgaze” works? It says “we’re more an electronic group with guitars than a guitar band with electronics,” hopefully. 

Q: After such a long gap between albums, did making Separation Team change anything about how you see Siren Section now, like what kind of band this is in 2026 versus what it was before?

JOHN: Honestly, I’m just happy to be able to make music I care about without really any agenda other than doing it.  At this point, I know what we’ve done is pretty unique, musically and sonically, and in the act of working with James for so long.  Working with people you care about on something you really care about over a long period of time is incredibly underrated.  Making music with your friends is underrated and should be a celebrated part of more people’s lives.

JAMES: I think by the time we finished the record, I understood us more definitively as “a duo.” John and I started in a four-piece band called JINSAI, over twenty years ago, so that brought in all these prog and metal influences from Mike [Harpel], and then Phil [Rodriguez] is an amazing jazz trumpet/keyboardist. We were very much a full band, with each person busily doing their part in the live show, and that incarnation lasted for about 10 years, give or take. 

Mike and Phil moved out of state, so we had to choose if we were going to keep calling ourselves JINSAI, or rename, and I think we did the right move. 

But even then, some of the early Siren Section songs actually had started off as JINSAI songs, and it was an easy trick, to just play through an old song minus Mike and Phil. It would still work, but that sort of calcified that way I think, and I’m glad that’s been reset. Earlier on I could say that Siren Section was really just a continuation/rebranding of JINSAI, but I think now it’s very much its own thing, built on the two of us contributing equally to it.  

Q: Now that the record’s out and people are living with it, what parts of it are you most excited to hear reflected back to you, the songs, the themes, or even just the mood of it?

JAMES: I’ve been really happy to see some reports from people who went deep and got lost in something there. I really hoped we’d “created a world” with this, and I’m not entirely sure I knew what that entailed when we were putting this together, I just knew we were “world building” this time, as opposed to earlier records we’d done. 

JOHN: It’s been cool to hear which songs people gravitate towards, because it is somewhat of a mystery to me.  I’m not sure why particular songs resonate with others, because it is never a simple formula.  If it was, people would be in the lab churning out connection spells.

JAMES: Even if it didn’t necessarily start out that way, it more or less became our attempt at one of those epic “double albums,” and I’d like to think it might be having a sort of effect on people stumbling on this thing that we obsessed over. It’s a love letter to those sorts of albums. We wanted to create the kind of experience where people lose themselves in a world, and some people have reached out and told us how they’ve gotten lost in it…

We also had someone write to us to describe a profound experience they had listening to the record on acid, and that’s awesome. Sincerely. I love to hear about powerful psychedelic experiences, in general. 

Q: Looking ahead to the rest of this year, what’s next for Siren Section? Are you in a mode now where more music, visuals, or shows are already starting to take shape?

JAMES: Now we’re going into full-on rehearsals to prepare for the live gigs. We’re redesigning that entirely, so it’s something of a production. I don’t want to spoil it, but I’ll say that we’re committing to the live visuals in a way we never did before.

JOHN: We’re working on something that incorporates reactive visuals, improvisation, and hopefully some interesting interpretations of the songs.  I want the songs to breathe more live and become something else in the live setting.  It is always interesting to see a song take on a life of its own and try to follow it to the best version of itself.   

JAMES: I think in the past, especially coming from the JINSAI lineage, we maybe saw leaning on visuals as gimmicky… In the past year since I’ve been getting more seriously into video art, it’s become a necessary component of the live show design. 

But that all comes with new technical hurdles and things to figure out, so that’s where we are, and will probably be for a couple more months. 

The year is just starting off though, and we have the JINSAI stuff to actually start releasing, as soon as the album has cooled a bit. People haven’t really heard it, for the most part, so we’re going to start trickling those out one at a time. It’s more advisable in the singles-driven industry model, probably?