‘Siren Section’ is a duo based in Los Angeles, made up of two amazing artists who’ve been creating immersive pieces of music for a while now. James Cumberland and John Dowling have been making music together complimenting each-other’s accent for over two decades. Their music feels like an intricate symphony of shoegaze, post-punk, electronic, and experimental rock, which they call ‘glitchgaze’. Their innovation seeps through their projects and if you listen to their tracks, you’ll be spellbound within the first few tracks. Their music dives deep into the pond of introspection leaving the listeners in a haze. This duo’s extensive soundscapes are something worth witnessing if you love to listen to music that is unsettling and profound.
Siren Section feels like two old collaborators translating decades of shared history into shimmering noise, quiet dread, and strangely beautiful clarity.
Separation team by Siren Sections is a 19 song album which will take you on a trip to a whole different dimension. Each track in this album is laced with Siren Section’s special glitchgaze sauce. Each beat and each word in the lyrics is placed to create an impact and if you’re looking for experiences, this is one hell of an album that’ll move your soul and clench your heart while it beats.
The album starts off with ‘CONSTRUCT’ and slowly progresses into ‘BULLET TRAIN’ which lays the foundations of the album while clearing out the clutter from the listener’s mind. By the end of the third track, ‘SOLIDARITY’, all you’ll be able to think of would be the tracks and the things that Siren Section dictates. Each track is a deeper dive into this delicacy’s intricacies.
Bending the thin lines of genres, Siren Section has created an art piece that will go in through your ears and make each and every cell in your body feel it’s presence. The way ‘MEDICINE’ sets the tone for ‘FLINCH’, which is also one of my personal favourite, feels like melting of the genres. The album goes up and down like a rollercoaster and each dip feels deeper and higher at the same time.
After the bewitching interlude, ‘MARKER’ and ‘DANGEROUS’ to know releases the tension while keeping the essence of the album. The next two tracks, TRITAGONIST 1 and 2 pack immense energy and rawness. This acts as a catalyst for what’s yet to come. The next three tracks, ‘MINOTAUR’, ‘DEER HUNTER’ and ‘GLASS CANNON’ pushes you into a deeper well of anticipation. The albums becomes stationary for a second and starts breathing again in ‘TIMEGHOST’.
The rest of the albums is for you to discover! Mention the comments what you experienced through the next five tracks of this exquisite piece.
We had a chance to have a chat with the artist and here’s how it went-
1- After eight years away from full-length releases, what made 2025 the right time to come back with Separation Team?
Answer – It wasn’t exactly planned that way, and we didn’t intend for the album to take so long to finish, but it just wound up going that route. Really, we actually thought we’d be releasing a year ago… that was the date we originally had planned on our original teaser clip.
But we’re really happy with what we put together. I think we made something unique.
2- The album took four years to make. Was that intentional patience, or did the songs demand that much time to come together?
Answer – I mean, if you go back to the earliest songwriting on that, we’d be getting into MEDICINE or the beat for TRITAGONIST, we’re going back nearly a decade to where some of the songs started.
I’d been going through some health issues, and it felt like tackling this really big, ambitious creative goal was part of some kind of rehabilitation for me. And getting back into the swing of writing songs again… especially with picking up these loose fragments and turning them into something current, felt like a challenge that was healthy.
Maybe if I’d started from a better baseline, health-wise, the record wouldn’t have taken so long.
3- How much of the album’s themes around separation and disconnection came from observing the world versus your own personal experiences?
Answer – I’d say it’s a really personal album, but I think that could be misleading. It’s not autobiographical, but it comes from a real place. I feel like when a concept resonates with you, it can be good to just follow it on intuition, and so it started with disassociation, in a general sense, but it applied to my personal framework. I tried to keep it distant enough though that people can project their own reading onto it. It can start with a notion as blunt as “this feels similar to this dissimilar concept,” and just trust that.. and it got really personal and emotionally intense in places I guess… It’s a lot darker than we probably expected it to be.
4- What does a concept album mean to you in 2025, when most people consume music as isolated tracks?
Answer – I think it’s unfortunate that “the album” is getting lost as a general concept, but I don’t think we’re “making a statement” with this big ambitious thing. It’s not some gauntlet being thrown down… but it’s a love letter to an era when these albums were worlds you could enter and lose yourself in. It doesn’t always mean you’re trying to make Tommy, but you can let yourself go with a concept that holds it all together.
There were some songs that just became obviously “about something else” and were “cut,” but that’s because they weren’t part of the larger whole that we were trying to put together… and it got more ambitious as we went along, and as time passed it felt like it was naturally snowballing this “epic” momentum
After this though, yes, we’ll be putting out singles for a bit, and releasing shorter, less insane things.
5- You’ve been making music together for over twenty years. How has your creative disagreement process evolved, or has it stayed the same?
Answer – We don’t really disagree anymore, we kinda just offer our opinions. We don’t take anything personally. We can say “that sucks, please stop” and it’s not like it’s an insult… we know when we’re on target and when we’re drifting off, and we have learned when and how to support the other in pulling off what they’re trying to do.
For instance, this album had a completely different ending originally, and John hated the thing I put together. Not just that he hated the song, but that he disliked the sentiment of it, and that he felt it was a shitty way to end the record. So it was just, ok… obviously, well, that’s not an option then. I don’t want to put out an album where John’s not happy with how it ends, so I’m not going to fight over it. We’re here to reach a mutual goal, not prove a point or get our way. I argued why I thought it worked, but it didn’t change his mind, so the only solution was to end the album differently.
And I am pretty happy with how we ended it… so, John was right.
6- If someone only listens to one track to understand what you’re doing here, which one do you point them toward, and why?
Answer – The first track that we picked up and sorta “got the band back together” with was TIMEGHOST… and at that point, I don’t think we’d entirely mapped out how big or grandiose we were thinking of getting… really, we just wanted to start with one song, and then we’d know where we were at.
And the song that came out of it was this odd thing that repeatedly just refused to work. It definitely didn’t function on its own, but maybe that’s why it would be good as a singular choice, out of context, to represent the record. It makes all these shifts through these genre concepts, eventually landing at this abrupt and unexpectedly sad pivot, and I feel like something that we stitched together there with the lyrics “sums up” the crisis at the center of the record, conceptually… and as far as musically, what genre is that song? I have no idea, and I love that about it.
Muse Chronicle 
Leave a comment