Global warming is a topic that elicits impassioned anger in some and resigned shrugs in others — seldom is anyone ever genuinely excited to talk about it. So when Sirintip decided she wanted to make an album about climate change, she knew it had to be sexy. She started by examining materials available in her Uptown Manhattan apartment: plastic trash from her kitchen and a water jug she decided to use as a drum to create. She also wanted to incorporate sounds from nature; she found a video online of a bird native to New Guinea, the Black Sicklebill, and sampled its strangely melodic mating call.
The result was an upbeat, jazz-infused song that washes over you like a rising tide: “Plastic Bird” is a part of her second album, ”carbon,” which dropped last October. The entire project is like a sonic Trojan Horse, so sensual and experimental that a first-time listener wouldn’t necessarily know that it was about the man-made destruction of our planet. For Sirintip, that’s the point.
“I don’t think we will find solutions by making climate change a more polarized topic,” she told HuffPost. “You still have to make an album about climate change, fine art and enjoy the music for what it is.”
When I tell Sirintip, a half-Thai, half-Swedish multimodal musician, that she reminds me of a Thai Solange, she smiles and tells me it’s not the first time she’s heard that. Her experimental and tantric rhythms feel drawn from a deep place. Like a certain Knowles sister, she is unafraid to delve into the more peripheral parts of her cultural repertoire for inspiration. She uses Thai instruments and sounds not often heard in “Western” music, electronic and pop beats that harken to ABBA’s homeland — and jazz, which brought her to New York in the first place. Many songs on ”carbon” are slow burn and don’t have clear-cut melodies or hooks. In other words, Sirintip is not here to make TikTok music.
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