An artist must be always willing to explore and experiment with their music. This is the only way to true growth in your authentic music career. It has been a while but our friend Sienná continues to show her imagination with new music. We caught up with the innovative artist to see what she is up to now. Enjoy the interview here:
Good to hear from you again Sienná. It has been about 3 years since we chatted. What have you been up to?
Thank you for having me here again. Glad to talk with you after all these surreal years with covid. Hope you’ve been doing well! I’ve been very busy as always, but also helped a lot by a lockdown situation that has offered me more time to engage in my introspective activities without moving. Ironic but true.
Your brand new album Wa-Kei-Sei-Jyaku 和敬清寂 was just released. Tell us about it.
This is my 6th full album and 10th original release. It’s dreamy, cinematic, other-worldly and…of course crossover, sometimes unconventional. Every each release reflects on where I was and what I lived for in my life so far. Sometimes it was a stop to smell some roses, some other time it was a necessary pause to heal from exhaustion. This time, I´m like the woman on my album artwork, floating in the water, pausing to reflect, letting go and waiting for the wind to change, or the tide to turn. One thing is for sure, I´m certainly getting older haha. But I´m still here, making music and living life to the fullest. So I´m grateful for this opportunity of being able to release new music again.
Where did you record the album?
I recorded this album in my home studio under lockdowns. I already had my setup consisted of my beloved life partner Roland D-50, connected it to audio/midi Interface, further on to MacBook with dual display and a headset. Unfortunately I didn’t have an access to additional instruments this time, like classical piano for instance. So I used sampler plugins quite a lot. It worked amazingly well though, with envelope, filtering and velocity triggering options. I’ve never felt so lucky to be an electronic artist who has this mobility and flexibility.
This being your 10th release, what developments do you think you have made along the journey?
I can find some signs of identity crisis in my earlier releases when I look back in time, Sometimes what I believed I wanted to do wasn´t exactly what I was meant to do. I think it was a necessary process of growth, and learned so much from all the successful and unsuccessful attempts. My ultimate goal is to technically bring out the unique and beautiful sound design for my own music production. I´m also trying to adopt the Japanese Wabi-Sabi philosophy and simplicity into the music. As Steve Jobs said, simple can be harder than complex. I´m consciously working on to be a functional minimalist.
Where did the inspiration come for the new record?
Like anyone else during the pandemic, I had so much time to pause, reflect and think. Then I started to focus intensely on a special place that I´ve had in my mind for a long time. The place is called Tenkawa shrine (Nara, Japan) – and enshrines a deity of water, music and art. So I wanted to visualize myself, visiting the shrine for so-called “sanpai” (meaning “visiting a shrine to pray” in Japanese) and describe it in my music. In that way I could also restore some blurry old memories from there with sound. A few tracks were also inspired by the philosophy of Sen no Rikyū, the master of the tea ceremony from 1500s. Though, not everything was Japanese inspired. Frassitelli on the Italian island of Ischia is my favorite spot for meditation. I wrote “Encircled Me Now” while I was sitting there before covid.
How has the response been from your growing fanbase?
“What the hell have you done this time?” was the first thing I heard, lol. I guess my fanbase consists mostly of people who are sick and tired of all the predictable mainstream music. They knew at least that they wouldn´t hear any poppy pop from me, either love it or hate it. Feedbacks have just started to come in after the release 5 days ago. It might be disappointing for EDM lovers, but so far positive and encouraging. Taste in music is subjective. But I´m happy if the listeners find my music to be unique or progressively improving in the course of my musical career.
We also saw the new song and /video for “Pay It Forward”. Quite an interesting one. Tell us about it.
“Quite interesting” was exactly what came to my mind too, haha! It was the only stand-alone track that stuck out of the context. Due to some positive messages that might be relevant to many situations in the world today, I chose it as my new single and made a lyric video for it. One day I had a lot fun playing nonsense on the synth, and finished writing this within a few hours or so. Later I added scrabble words that ended up with making quite good sense, so kept them. Certainly the track was a bit weird, but it was interesting enough to be included in the album. In a good or bad way? I´m not sure.
What is next for Sienná?
What I would like to do next probably might be some collaborations with visual creators and cross-genre artists. There are a few potential plans and ongoing discussions, but they are under development right now. Either way, I´ll need a vacation to empty my mind and reset everything first. The main focus for me currently is songwriting and producing, so I´m hoping to catch some inspirations somewhere in the air, and start moving on towards the next chapter or new concept. Let´s see what the universe brings me next.
Keep up with Sienna on her WEBSITE.
