BLACK BORDELLO Interview

Few bands manage to weave raw energy with haunting storytelling the way Black Bordello does. Known for their unflinching lyrics and genre-bending sound, they’ve quickly carved out a space that feels both daring and deeply personal. In this conversation, the band opens up about their creative process, the themes that drive their music, and the experiences that shape their art.

What follows is an unfiltered glimpse into the world of Black Bordello.

Your live shows often feel more like immersive theatre than traditional gigs, with cabaret, masks, and choreography. When you write a song, do you already envision how it will play out on stage, or does the performance concept come later?

Daniel: For every new song, Sienna typically presents the band with a fully formed structure before our combined input changes anything. Her writing style is unique in that, though the songs themselves are highly conceptual entities, she finds the subject matter last in most cases. The melody is the first and most important thing, around which the rest of the song tends to grow. When it comes to porting them to the stage, it’s less about individual songs for us and more about the overall experience. For example, at our White Bardo release show at MOTH Club, we had a ghostly procession of lost souls parade through the crowd, more because that created a haunting mood, and was thematic to the entire album, than because it was intended to rhyme with a particular song concept.

Your debut album was rich with gothic jazz and vaudeville textures, while White Bardo explores mortality, spirituality, and almost metaphysical soundscapes. What was the turning point that pushed your sound and themes in this deeper, more cinematic direction?

Sienna: Put simply, I get bored of ideas very quickly. I wrote our first album in my adolescence; I was studying art at university whilst formulating the concepts for our debut eponymous album. At the time I was interested in ‘mundane’ issues. Matters of the body, femininity, sexuality, grief, depression, sleep, etc. I also had an obsession with clowns after I spent a summer at clown school training to be a clown myself. These were very vital developmental concepts for me and I often lent into vaudeville and playful circus foolery as catharsis from the reality of grief, mental health and a society with a deficit of compassion. However, just like all of my obsessions, I tire quickly. I still love clowns. But I found a greater passion in delving into ideas outside of the mundane and material. There was no turning point as such, but a gradual evolution of my interests into deeper waters.

The concept of the ‘bardo’ in Buddhism represents a transitional state. What drew you to that concept, and how do you translate such a spiritual and philosophical idea into something listeners can feel sonically?

Sienna: I began thinking about the Bardo during lockdown. I struggle with depression and anxiety and have tried various things—antidepressants, therapy, etc. During lockdown I decided I needed a solution and discovered Transcendental Meditation after I watched an interview with David Lynch (rest in eternal power) describing it. Since then, I meditate twice a day for 20 minutes and in this way I connect with a liminal but more truthful side of myself. I was always drawn to the concept of the Bardo as it has been depicted in film and books. I started hearing ideas for this album when reading The Last Museum by Brion Gysin, whereby someone enters a hotel of lost souls between worlds. After being involved with TM and The David Lynch Foundation for years they sponsored me to go to India to meditate in an ashram, which was an amazing experience. That trip taught me that the physical world isn’t just physical or mundane—there’s so much more, but we don’t have the senses to fully perceive it. "Bardo" could be the space between life and death, but it’s also the space between one thought and the next. It could also be a spot between wakefulness and dreaming. What we perceive as reality is just one timeline; there are other layers of reality happening simultaneously, and I’m only interested in wandering in from door to door. Like a cold caller selling tea towels! It all feels pretentious when an independent musician from Peckham aligns their album with concepts of interdimensionality, but it’s just the way my brain works. The music lends itself to chance, the dream world and the subconscious, and combines with what I experience in the transcendental state to come to represent the bardo in some ways.

The single Nunhead reflects on gentrification while being inspired by the cemetery of the same name. How do you balance social commentary with the poetic, almost mythical tone of your songwriting?

Sienna: There’s no possible way for me to create countercultural or subversive art without commenting on sociopolitical issues. The fact that we encountered yoga mums and people on Hinge dates in a public cemetery where my relatives and many other departed souls rest is itself a reflection on the psychopathy of neoliberalism. My Mediterranean and Middle Eastern heritage is rich with mythology and folklore - word-of-mouth stories which are thousands of years old. I find an integrity in the fact that though society’s trends and changes are fleeting and whimsical, the tales of our ancestors are unchanged and immovable.

Daniel: Dichotomy and contradictions are such an important part of coming up with an exciting piece, and to me the dichotomies in Black Bordello songs draw attention to the space between the ancient and the post-modern; between spiritual knowledge that goes unspoken and the over-opinionated garble of daily newsstands; finally, between the chasm of death and despair, and the limitless wonder of the living imagination.

Black Bordello is often described as a collective. How do the dynamics between you — Sienna, Jerome, Daniel, Indigo, Melody — shape the creative process? Is it democratic chaos, or is there a strong guiding hand?

Daniel: Though we build on Sie’s ideas collaboratively, and we each bring a unique personality to the sound, ultimately her role as the main songwriter is to mold our creative voices together with her concept. She brings us the material that she’s written, and then we help to add our own shape and colour to the music, depending on our various skills and tastes. For example, on drums, I usually end up suggesting some rhythmic nonsense to glue sections together, or trying to slot in ridiculous fills (some call it ‘overplaying’). Jerome has an incredible understanding of soundscapes, and adds the feel of the lead guitar as a cinematic instrument. Mel throws in flourishes of classical romanticism on piano, as well as a mastery of the glitchy electronic capabilities of the Korg synth. Indi’s steady hand and insane technical abilities basically mean that Sie can hum any bass part imaginable and he is able to play it on demand, embellishing it with various tricks he’s learned from extensive jazz-funk session work. We understand each other to such a degree that very little debate is required in the rehearsal room - mostly, we just feel things out and encourage each other to express ourselves!

Your music often feels cinematic, almost like it could score a surreal film. If White Bardo were adapted into a movie, who would you want to direct it, and what would the opening scene look like?

Daniel: All of us are huge fans of David Lynch (may he rest in peace), so he would be the first pick for director. His brand of surrealism and the influence of jazz and noir in his films is very much what Black Bordello is about. If we’re talking White Bardo specifically, something that has always sprung to mind is also Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, especially the scenes featuring the carnivalesque masked cultists, chanting in a circle. If White Bardo were a movie, the opening scene would be something like if David Lynch directed Eyes Wide Shut, with added hints of animation from Salvador Dali and Leonora Carrington.

You’ve woven together art-rock, gothic jazz, and post-punk while still sounding cohesive. Is genre something you consciously think about in the studio, or do you just follow where the music takes you?

Sienna: I never think about genre, and I don’t find thinking about genre useful at all in my creative endeavours. This may be why so many people class our music as ‘genre-defying’ or ‘genre-less’. My only priority is to execute the idea I have, rather than concerning myself with what category it might fit into: in my opinion, the idea of genre is outdated, and therefore doesn’t effectively apply to the music I’d like to make.

Daniel: It’s interesting, because even in the band we have differing thoughts about style and genre. We’re all inspired by such a plethora of disparate references that it’s almost impossible to make the sort of music we do without being at least semi-conscious of where we got it. Bands like Mr Bungle come to mind, whose ambitious polystylism was tongue-in-cheek, winking knowingly while they cycled between ska, jazz, nu-metal and everything in between. I think we take reference from silliness like that, but also from the more conscious and subtle genre-hopping of artists like David Bowie and Bjork, whose sound constantly metamorphosed throughout their career, in ways that were simultaneously unexpected and meticulously well-thought-out. That said, it is true that we don’t ever really say ‘let’s do a jazz section now’ - all the stylistic variance happens typically without prompt.

Recording White Bardo must have been an intense creative journey. Was there a particular moment during the sessions — maybe a lyric, a chord, or an improvisation — where you felt, ‘This is the soul of the album’?

Sienna: We recorded the album in a lot of different spots, spanning a significant length of time, even working with different producers. I wanted one overarching track that brought the concept of the Bardo together, linking all those separate sessions together. This happened in a spontaneous studio moment, when we started asking ChatGPT about what happens when we die. We then ended up writing a poem on the spot, and recorded an improvised soundscape which became the title track to introduce the record. It was totally unexpected and unplanned; we ended up leaving the studio in the early hours of the morning; and none of us could quite explain what had transpired. 

Daniel: I remember looking at Sie’s laptop screen in one session, when we had just cut the instrumental, but we had incomplete lyrics for the song, and her background was Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’. Of course, while that eventually became the song title, I associate Bosch’s painting style with giving form to Sienna’s imagined world. In many ways, if Black Bordello is ‘an exercise in musical world-building’, the clearest artistic representation of White Bardo might be some kind of epic medieval triptych, featuring all manner of bizarre creatures in a vortex of psychedelic torment.

If you could curate your own immersive gig anywhere in the world — no limits on budget or venue — where would it be, and what wild elements would you bring to make it unmistakably Black Bordello?

Sienna: We’d be tied between a giant unknown cave which people could only reach by boat; the coliseum at Pompeii where Pink Floyd recorded the infamous ‘Echoes’ performance; and the chapel over at Nunhead cemetery. We’d have a travelling circus featuring an assortment of clowns, there would be surrealist projections and pyrotechnics, sword swallowers and papier mache creatures from international mythology. It would be hilarious, I hope we actually do get this kind of opportunity one day.

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By the REAL Editorial Team | Sep 1, 2025