Siren (Susumu Hirasawa album)
Siren is the sixth solo album by Susumu Hirasawa. Overview As with the previous album Sim City, it was greatly influenced by Hirasawa's trips to Thailand and continues that album's style and concepts. Starting from fertility goddesses and a "mermaid legend" he heard (possibly Suvannamaccha), Hirasawa investigated legends from around the world to see how much the ideals represented by the country's transgender women (with whom he spent most of his time in the country with) manifest in their myths, which led him to discover the same frequent pattern of fertility goddesses seducing humans and associations with gender variance or androgyny. He also interpreted such ideas as the Gemini myth and the concept of yin and yang as examples of things possessing attributes of both genders. The conclusion that Hirasawa derived from his research is that no matter what culture one is from, the balance between masculinity and femininity is a valued concept. If this balance peacefully exists in one human being, they can be likened to a god in that respect, with Thai transgender women being the ideal example of this. Although though this relatively abstract idea was the driving concept behind the album, Hirasawa tried to express it