SIERRA VEINS interview: ‘Safe enough to let go of some of that control’

There is a productive contradiction at the centre of SIERRA VEINS: what can appear almost uncontrolled onstage depends on an unusually rigorous degree of preparation. Lighting cues and instrumental parts are fixed in advance, yet the security of that technical structure is precisely what allows the performance to become less predictable, more physical and more responsive to the room. The same relationship between control and surrender exists in the writing process. Images, colours, places and even titles can precede the music itself, so the visual world is not something designed afterwards to illustrate finished songs; it belongs to the same compositional vocabulary from the beginning.

That interconnected thinking became particularly explicit on “In The Name Of Blood”, SIERRA VEINS’ second album, released in November 2025. Its exploration of identity, inheritance and DNA coincided with the transition from SIERRA to SIERRA VEINS, while the recurring image of veins and cables allows biology and technology to occupy the same visual language. The album also reflects how profoundly performing has altered the way SIERRA composes: although the stage is not allowed to dictate the writing, certain moments were deliberately created with physical performance in mind.

That tension between human instability and machine precision extends well beyond the album. In February 2026, SIERRA VEINS released the 19-track “HypnoVizion 031: SIERRA VEINS” DJ mix, using selection and sequencing to expose musical interests that extend outside her own production, while January 2027 will bring her first Australian dates alongside Carpenter Brut, revisiting an artistic relationship that previously produced “Power”.

I spoke with SIERRA VEINS just a while before her performance at Nocuturnal Culture Night Festival in Deutzen – about why artistic abandon requires technical security, composing simultaneously through sound and images, allowing the body to influence electronic music, the changing meaning of songs once they reach the stage, collaboration as a question of shared emotional language, and why the next significant evolution of SIERRA VEINS may happen visually before it happens musically.

Sierra Veins interview

Karo: I have seen you live several times now, and one thing that keeps fascinating me is that I never feel I am watching exactly the same show twice. The visual language is recognisable, the songs are familiar, but the physical intensity, the movement and even the way the light seems to interact with you change every time. How much of a SIERRA VEINS performance is actually fixed, and how much is allowed to mutate according to the room, the audience and your own state that night? Is there a carefully constructed structure that gives you the freedom to become almost wild inside it?

SIERRA VEINS: I’m glad to hear that. My live show is very structured: the lighting and the parts I play with my instruments are predetermined in advance, but there are many things that can vary from one show to another, beyond simply the selection of songs, and make the experience different.

The size of the venue, the location or type of festival, the lighting and sound setup, which can change from one place to another, and of course my own performance all have an influence. From one night to another, depending on how I feel and what is happening in the moment, I can interpret a song in one way or another.

Karo: You have said that when you begin an album, you often start with atmosphere, images and mood boards before the actual composition, and that with “In The Name Of Blood” the visual world of blood, veins, cables and green existed very early in the process. That makes me wonder whether “visuals” is even the right word, because it suggests something added to music afterwards. Do you experience light, colour, sound and movement as separate elements at all, or are you effectively composing one work in several sensory languages?

SIERRA VEINS: Indeed, all the EPs and albums I’ve released so far were written with a universe already in my mind. I often have images, colours, places or even song and album titles in mind before I actually start writing them. Bringing all these ideas together allows me to create a kind of starting point that then guides the way I compose and gives a direction to the whole project.

So I don’t really separate the music from everything that surrounds it. For me, it’s all part of the same universe and everything develops together.

Karo: There is a contradiction in your stage presence that I find particularly interesting. From the audience it can look uncontrolled, extremely physical, almost feral, yet you have said that when the organisation is precise, the equipment works and everything around the performance is properly under control, your performance becomes much stronger. Does abandon actually require discipline? Do you need to construct a completely safe technical framework before you can allow yourself to become unsafe artistically?

SIERRA VEINS: That’s exactly it. When I feel confident and reassured by the technical side of things, and when I feel that the situation is under control, that’s when I can completely let go and feel much freer on stage.

I think it’s the same with my writing process. The moments when I manage to go where I really want to go creatively are the moments when I feel safe enough to let go of some of that control.

Karo: You have also explained that you thought much more about live performance while writing “In The Name Of Blood”, particularly creating room to move away from the machines and towards the audience. That is interesting because it reverses the usual process of making a record and then figuring out how to perform it. Has the body now entered your compositional thinking from the beginning? When you write something new, do you already know what you will physically need to do with it onstage?

SIERRA VEINS: When I started SIERRA VEINS, I didn’t actually intend to perform live. I wrote my first EPs without thinking about any of this, and I was very far from those considerations.

Then, little by little, as I started playing more shows, I realised that some tracks that work well on record don’t necessarily translate as well on stage. And the opposite is also true: some tracks that have a strong impact live aren’t necessarily the most listened to.

Today, I don’t want those considerations to be at the centre of my mind when I’m writing, but I do like to keep a few ideas about the live show in the back of my mind while I compose. On my latest album, there are definitely some moments that I wrote specifically with the stage in mind.

But it’s still very difficult to know in advance how a track will translate live. You only really discover that once you start performing it and seeing how it feels on stage and how the audience responds to it.

Karo: The current stage design uses cables as part of the language of veins, blood and identity, but I also read those cables in another way: they belong equally to electronic machinery. The image is simultaneously biological and technological. Is that ambiguity interesting to you? Your music is created electronically, but your performance is intensely bodily; do you see SIERRA VEINS as existing somewhere in that tension between machine precision and the instability of a human body?

SIERRA VEINS: Yes, that ambiguity is definitely something that interests me. I’m fascinated by digital art, technology, computer-based music and all of that, but at the same time, it’s very important to me that human emotions remain at the centre of what I write.

It’s quite similar on stage. I wouldn’t want to spend an entire 1h10 show behind my machines. I like the idea that my live shows alternate between moments that are purely electronic, where I’m interacting with my machines, and other moments that are more stripped back technologically, with more space for my voice and my physical presence on stage. That contrast between the human and the machine is important to me.

Karo: You once said that it is difficult to generalise about audiences from one country to another because the energy can change completely from one concert to the next. Having watched you more than once, that makes sense to me because your performance seems unusually responsive to the immediate space. What actually changes you most: the size of the stage, proximity of the audience, the architecture of the venue, technical limitations, or simply the energy coming back at you? Have you ever walked onstage with one idea of what the concert would be and realised within the first few minutes that the room required something completely different?

SIERRA VEINS: I would say the technical aspect is probably what can influence my performance the most. My show is quite demanding technically, both in terms of lighting and sound. And as I mentioned earlier, if I don’t feel confident for one reason or another, my performance on stage will definitely be affected. My energy and mental space might be entirely focused on making sure that everything runs properly from a technical point of view.

Then I would say that what can vary the most is the energy coming from the audience. And that really depends on the configuration and size of the venue, the time of the show, etc. There are no rules. But one thing is certain: the more responsive the audience is, the more energy I give on stage.

And yes, it happens very often that I walk on stage and, after a few songs, realise that it’s not at all what I expected. You can never really know in advance.

Karo: “In The Name Of Blood” deals with identity, inheritance, DNA and the uncomfortable question of how much of ourselves is chosen and how much is already carried within us; even the transition from SIERRA to SIERRA VEINS became part of that idea. But then you have spent months performing those questions repeatedly in front of strangers. Has the live cycle changed your own relationship with the album’s subject? I wonder whether performing a work about identity night after night makes that identity feel more settled, or whether repetition reveals that it is actually much less stable than you thought.

SIERRA VEINS: Performing the album on stage for the past few months hasn’t really changed the way I see the questions around identity that I explore on the album.

However, my relationship with the songs can change a lot through performing them. Some of them take on a different dimension on stage, and some that I may have felt less attached to at first become very important in the live show, and vice versa. So I would say that it’s not necessarily my perception of my own identity that evolves through performing, but rather my relationship with certain songs.

Karo: Your most recent release is “HypnoVizion 031: SIERRA VEINS”, a 19-track DJ mix for HypnoVizion. I find that format interesting in relation to your own records because an album constructs identity through sounds you create, whereas a DJ mix can construct identity through choices, transitions and relationships between other people’s music. What can you say about yourself through selection that you perhaps cannot say through composition? Do you consider sequencing and juxtaposition another form of authorship?

SIERRA VEINS: I think DJ mixes are mostly a way for me to show a broader range of my musical tastes. I listen to a lot of music that is quite different from what I produce myself, so it’s a good opportunity to share that side of what I like. There is obviously a creative process in selecting tracks, finding the right transitions and building a progression throughout a mix, so yes, I think it can be a form of authorship, but it’s really difficult to compare it to composing music.

Karo: Collaboration has appeared repeatedly in your work, from HEALTH, Carpenter Brut and Gunship around “A Story Of Anger” to Ghost Dance on “Memory Cells” from “In The Name Of Blood”. What makes a collaboration genuinely worthwhile to you? Is the most interesting collaborator someone who understands your language immediately, or someone who introduces an element that initially feels incompatible with it? In other words, are you looking for recognition or productive friction?

SIERRA VEINS: A collaboration is really worthwhile when you feel there is an artistic understanding. For me, the most interesting collaborator is someone who speaks the same artistic language, and I don’t necessarily mean having the same artistic universe. I mean someone who understands the emotion, the vibe, even if our universes can sometimes be very different.

For me, a good collaboration is mostly about communication and understanding each other from the start.

Karo: You have now announced your first Australian tour for 2027 supporting Carpenter Brut, which gives another chapter to a creative relationship that already includes “Power”. Does returning to the same artistic relationship years later feel different once both artists have moved forward? And does touring together create possibilities that a studio collaboration does not, perhaps even for something new to emerge between the projects?

SIERRA VEINS: A lot has changed since we first worked on “Power”. The last time we toured together, I hadn’t released an album yet and I had much less experience on stage. So going to Australia together several years later will obviously be a very different experience, and I’m really looking forward to it.

As for new collaborations, I’d be very happy to work together again. We’ll see what happens!

Karo: You said earlier this year that you were still composing, experimenting with new sounds and working on remixes, but that you deliberately did not want to rush into defining the next release; interestingly, you have also said that although you do not yet know what form that next release will take, you already know something about its visual direction, its colours and its vocabulary. So perhaps this is the right place to finish: when you imagine the next version of SIERRA VEINS, what feels as though it actually needs to change? Is the next step primarily musical, visual, performative, collaborative, or are you beginning to imagine a form in which those distinctions no longer make much sense?

SIERRA VEINS: I’m taking a lot of time to experiment with different things, think, and figure out where I want to go next. It’s still a little unclear, but I’m moving forward with my research. Maybe my answer will be different in a few months, but right now, I think the next evolution of the project will probably be more on the visual and graphic side. I won’t say more for now.

About SIERRA VEINS

SIERRA VEINS is a Paris-based French electronic artist whose work moves through darkwave, EBM, synthwave, techno and heavier electronic forms. The project began in 2017 under the name SIERRA, after a period devoted to learning electronic production, and developed through releases including “Strange Valley,” “Gone” and the 2023 full-length “A Story Of Anger.” The change from SIERRA to SIERRA VEINS was announced in 2025; rather than signalling a musical reinvention, the new name gave a more individual identity to the project and coincided naturally with the themes of inheritance, blood and identity explored on the second album.

Released on 7 November 2025, “In The Name Of Blood” centres on identity and the inherited information carried through DNA, with the name change itself incorporated into the album’s creative framework. The record includes “Memory Cells,” created with Ghost Dance, while earlier work has connected SIERRA VEINS with artists including Carpenter Brut, HEALTH and Gunship.

Her catalogue has increasingly developed in parallel with an elaborate performance language in which lighting, electronic machinery, voice and movement are conceived as interconnected rather than supplementary elements. That approach is particularly visible in the current “In The Name Of Blood” show, where the visual vocabulary of veins and cables deliberately collapses the distinction between the biological and technological body.

In February 2026 she released the 19-track, 46-minute “HypnoVizion 031: SIERRA VEINS” DJ mix, combining her own music with selections from artists including Boys Noize, Matteo Tura, Corvad, Ghost Dance and others.

In January 2027, SIERRA VEINS will travel to Australia with Carpenter Brut, joining the project for shows in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne before both appear at Froth & Fury Festival in Adelaide. The dates extend a collaboration that previously resulted in “Power” and arrive at a point when SIERRA VEINS is deliberately resisting the pressure to define her next release too quickly. For the moment, she suggests that the next substantial transformation may take place first in the project’s visual and graphic language rather than through an immediately identifiable musical shift.