Sienná turns the natural world into an immersive electronic language on new album ‘Ema’

Sienná has never sounded especially interested in following conventional electronic music rules, and 'Ema' pushes that instinct into one of her most immersive ideas yet.

Across nine tracks, the Kyoto-born, Oslo-based producer approaches the album as a series of image-to-sound translations, drawing inspiration from the interconnectedness of the natural world and the Japanese spiritual idea of the ema: a means of communicating directly with the divine.

Many of its ideas emerged while she was walking alone through the forests of Kyoto’s Kibune valley and across the island of Ischia. Unable to capture what she was seeing through drawing, she instead began turning those impressions into music, resulting in an experience that tries to preserve the sensations hidden inside the landscapes.

Opening track ‘Be A Seeker, Believer’ introduces a thread of resilience and self-belief, establishing a sense of hope that continues beneath the album’s more abstract moments. From there, tracks including ‘Your Fact, My Fact’, ‘Aenaria’ and ‘369 (Miroku)’ deepen the record’s exploratory character. While standout ‘Finding Inner Sanctuary’ perhaps states the wider intention most clearly.

Sienná’s long-standing East-meets-West approach remains fundamental here. Electronic experimentation sits alongside classical and jazz influences, while Japanese aesthetic ideas such as wabi-sabi bring a fascination with imperfection, transience and space into the arrangements. The reference points of Ryuichi Sakamoto, Massive Attack and Brian Eno make sense, but 'Ema' is far too idiosyncratic to settle comfortably inside any one lineage.

By the closing ‘From Here to Where You Are’, 'Ema' cements itself as a truly continuous act of observation, meditation and translation.

Expansive, strange and deeply atmospheric, the album finds Sienná turning forests, memory, spirituality and movement into a world that feels entirely her own.