Siren Signal

Commissioned for 'The International Lighthouse Relay' for the Folkestone Fringe

Growing up on the North Kent  coast, the sound of Foghorns was a seasonal event that signalled the warning of the impending and seemingly infinite cloud condition. The hollow yawn of these machines was imprinted in my memory, and bought with them a sense of reassurance that someone was watching and  guarding over would be travellers, and also those of us left on land. Their mournful cry echoed along the coast, bouncing off our chalk cliffs, yearning and piercing the impenetrable fog and thick sea mists that curtained the land and turned days into eerie twilights.

As a child their sleepy drone intrigued me and encased me in a comfort that drew my attention to the otherworldliness of an altered land/seascape blanketed in fog. Lying in my bed listening to the calling it was always my belief that the mournful sound emanated from the flashing beacon that was North Foreland Lighthouse in Broadstairs. I imagined that its sweeping cycloptic ray penetrated the thickening fog, and  protected those at sea from unknown hazards with not only its light but also with its sound.  It was 30 years or so later that I was informed that to the contrary North Foreland did not house a fog warning signal and that the moan that surfaced from memory was actually that of Tongue Light Vessel 1 (LV1), that would have been moored stationary and mostly silent on the Tongue sandbank 5 miles off Margate's coast. 

LV1 was removed from Tongue Sands in 1985, and along with it the fog horn sound became rarer both nationally and internationally due to both digital positioning technologies and the decommissioning of lighthouses and Light Vessels around our coastline.

In contradiction to its purpose while the fog horn endeavoured to keep vessels away, it always drew my attention and imagination back to it, to the place of hazard, mystery and wonder.  Like a siren of mythology,  its call warned and lured all at once. Due to this paradoxical song of myth, my recollection and misinterpretation of location and the voice like nature of the fog horn sound, I proposed  to use my own voice to create false fog horn sounds that mimic the sound of our lost warning signals. Once recorded and digitised they were manipulated to enhance their characteristics for the creation of the three songs that make 'Siren Signal'.

Vessel Song:that recovers and re-awakens my memory sound of the fog warning of Light Vessel 1.  

Ghost song: to describe an imagined yet absent signal at North Foreland Lighthouse. Which will aim to signify all the lost signals from around the world.  

Blanket song: a mimetic reply from the child of my past lying in his bed listening in the dark.


Siren Signal

STEVE MCPHERSON