Carbon is a self-produced alternative jazz album with a core message about sustainability. It was recorded in a solar-powered studio and released on bioplastic (compostable) vinyl. Sirintip has also performed solar-powered performances with the music of carbon. The album features members from Snarky Puppy including Michael League, Chris McQueen, and her co-producer Nic Hard.

hostage

hostage (mother earth)

This is one of the few songs on the album where the climate concern is clearly in the lyrics where mother earth is asking us to treat her better and letting her go from the grip that we have on her.

red eyes

red eyes (endangered Indochinese tigers)

As I was researching endangered animals, I learned that many of them are in Sumatra, an island in western Indonesia close to my home country Thailand. I decided to continue my search and I learned that tigers in Thailand are also endangered. Tigers have lost 95% of their habitat due to poaching, rising sea level, and human-wildlife conflict. To highlight the connection to Thailand, I used sampled thai drums, thai instrument Ranat & Thai guitar to make the track which I had recorded at Mahasarakham university in 2015 and Kengchakaj recorded a thai tuned moog synthesizer. The lyrics themselves are about being tokenized as a metaphorical perspective of tigers being feared but yet hunted and turned into trophies. Red eyes symbolizes the laser from the hunters gun that the tigers see.

1.5

1.5 (average global temperature)

“1.5” expresses the planet’s steady ongoing rise in temperature, pulling NASA data from 1880 through 2012. “It felt too obvious to me to portray the temperature steadily increasing the way it looks on the diagram,” says Sirintip. Instead of composing within the linear increase, she identified different years that felt significant to her, exploring what each “sounded like,” and anchored her composition around those selections.

Watch the Ableton’s One Thing series video to learn more about Sirintip’s process for this song

unspoken gold

unspoken gold (moving from fossil fuel to wind energy)

Unspoken gold is about the cleaning process of moving from fossil fuel into clean renewable wind energy.

The instrumentation is based on Owen Broder's baritone saxophone line that’s first recorded “dirty” with octave & distortion effects which later gets “cleaned up” to an acoustic sound while it also modulates from Eb minor to D major to showcase the transition of cleaning up the energy cycle. There’s also sampled factory sounds in the background for a more dirty sound & we created a snare by sampling a drill

i cannot escape

i cannot escape (wind/hurricane)

Just how many relationships come into our life, the wind can be a cooling breeze on a warm summer day or a hurricane that tears your house apart. No matter how much you try, you’re dependent on them because they’re also the air that you breathe. The lyrics to I cannot escape is based on this metaphorical relationship that we have to air and winds. No matter how comfortable or destructive it can be, we’ll always be dependent on it.

plastic bird

plastic bird (biodiversity)

Plastic Bird is based on the consequences of plastic pollution and the importance of biodiversity. The drums on the recording are a blend of sampled plastic trash from my kitchen, plastic water jugs as a part of the drum kit, and a grand piano recorded through a plastic container. The biodiversity part is emphasized during the intro where the rhythms of the vocal loops are transcribed from the Black Sickelbill’s mating dance. While writing the lyrics to Plastic Bird, I drew parallels to imposter syndrome: a plastic toy bird who wants to fly like the real birds but its fear of being discovered prevents it from even trying. This feeling of imposter syndrome is especially common among minority women, like south east asian women, and that feeling provides an empathetic anchor to the larger imperceptible notion of climate change.

Watch Sirintip’s official music video for plastic bird here

stranger of the sea

stranger of the sea (ocean)

Being 500 million years old, Nautilus is one of the oldest creatures on earth. What is their secret? How have they been able to survive for so long? Through all the ice age, asteroid attacks and more. What can we learn from nautilus and how can we live more in symbiosis with our planet?

earth moment

earth moment (awakening)

No matter how big or small our actions are, everything we do makes an impact. This song is an encouragement to all to take action today. No matter what it is, we’ll be able to create a cleaner sustainable world if we do it together.

it’s alright

it’s alright (plastic pollution)

Because she views “carbon” as a call to action for herself as much as her listeners, Sirintip centers self-disclosure throughout. Lyrics for “it’s alright” emerged from text messages between the artist and her best friend who passed away tragically at 28. The song’s connection to climate change is in the plastic instrumentation, but the message is more universal: We don’t need to be perfect. Sirintip used plastic trash from her kitchen for percussion programming.

siri

siri (digital waste)
Digital waste is written from the perspective of a computer & AI. It's about how even computers understand that our pace of always needing to upgrade and requiring more and more storage is unsustainable.

If everyone around the world deleted 10 emails (spam or not spam) it would equal deleting 1,725,00 GB of digital storage. Because storing 1GB of emails or 1,000 emails takes 32 kWh, generating 55.2 million kWh, we would save the same amount as charging almost 5 billion smartphone.