Symphony of Sirens (1922)

Symphony of Sirens (1922) is a reimagining of Arseny Avraamov’s seminal industrial music piece Symphony of Sirens (1922) as a Garry’s Mod server.

Volksamt Klang Manufaktur continues their series of re-enactments of significant 20th century compositions with a reimagining of Arseny Avraamov’s seminal industrial music piece Symphony of Sirens (1922) as a Garry’s Mod server.

Presented under the stwst84x11 2025's theme FOG MANIFESTO, the work reflects on the “fog of war” both literally and metaphorically. Avraamov’s Symphony was chosen as the conceptual ursprung because of its connection to fog of war in a literal sense; every performance of the piece had ended in disaster; in Baku, the artillery was shot to soon, covering the ground with so much smoke that documenting the piece was not possible, in Moscow it was played in such a large area that the artillery smoke made it impossible for the performers to see each other. Staying true to the symphony’s open but site-specific format, this re-enactment moves the composition to a video game server. An orchestra of bots fire an amount of bullets that Avraamov could only dream of, inline with the military excess plaguing the world.

At STWST VLKSFST Orkest was:
Gokay Atabek –
Fai Hathaway -

This project would not be possible without Falco Peijnenburg’s (https://github.com/FPtje) MIDI plug-in for Garys Mod and most importantly artist/bandmate/friend Berk Ozdemir’s (https://www.berkozdemir.com/) research/thesis/open source project PPPB.

Pictures by Ralph Petersen and Westley Hennigh-Palermo.

Presented at stwst84x11 during ArsElectronica 2025(AT)