Joonas Siren is a Finnish multidisciplinary artist and an electronic musician based in Helsinki. For the EMS residency, Siren will work on a project titled 'Rave Concrète', where he will try fuse the long history of electronic dance music with the concept of 'musique concrète'. He is interested in the intensities and singularities of rave music and how the individual elements function to form the music that we recognize as electronic dance based music.

Like the 'musique concrète' pioneer Pierre Schaeffer, Siren wants to isolate these elements to see if they can be used to form another kind of music. But, unlike Schaeffer, he believes that the source material does not lose its own inherent meaning. There is utopian potential in rave music that is seminal to consider. 
After the residency, the 'Rave Concrète' project will be turned into installation form as well.

Photo by Henna Herranen

Siren has graduated as MFA from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts from the Time & Space department and also from the joint study program Nordic Sound Art, organized by five different Nordic Art Academies. 

During the past five years he has played in many different venues in Helsinki and elsewhere with his main musical alias Forces, the last being Norberg Festival 2017 in Sweden as part of the Helsinki based THRDEYEVSN collective showcase. With Forces he released his debut album 'Plastisphere' on the Czech label Genot Centre in March 2018. 

His site-specific installations have been exhibited in places like: LAK Festival Copenhagen, Roskilde Contemporary Art Museum, Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum, Braunschweig Art Academy, Gallery Harmaa in Turku, Third Space, Oksasenkatu11 and Myymälä2 galleries in Helsinki.