Interview: Sehseiyah - Finding Power In Metaphorical Knives

Sehseiyah is an incredibly cool and evocative dark electronic artist based in L.A. who blew me away when I heard her. Formerly The Bedroom Witch, the new project has released an ep called 620 that has coaxed Metal Riot out of the death metal realm and into spooky and soothing whirls of club adjacent, gothy wonder.

I first discovered Sepehr Mashiahof on Tik Tok, of all places. She was promoting the single "Paranoid" and I was drawn to the aesthetics and catchy but elusive quality of it right away. The was something special here. Hey, TikTok is how a lot of kids found random Pavement B-sides! However we can discover cool and real music these days, it's all good!

1. So, it kind of makes sense to me that you are in the L.A./SoCal area. First of all, I didn't know that and wasn't that familiar with The Bedroom Witch material really. The name kind of rung a bell. But anyway, I am a NY transplant but have been drawn for years to a lot of the gothier, electronic or emotive and spooky stuff from out here. This sort of blend between darkness and light, nature and urban sprawl. Anyway, I first heard you on TikTok! And the "Paranoid" single connected with me. It fits so well with June Gloom (my fave time of year here) driving around past palm trees or spacing out on the balcony. How did this musical moment come to be for you?

There’s a lot of cool underground, dark electronic/goth adjacent artists in LA so you’re in good company looking for that here! And I love that you find my track “Paranoid” to be fitting during this June gloom season. I feel like the entire EP “620” is so winter-coded in my mind but there’s a duality to the tracks that can also give them this dancing in the car driving down a hot summer night kind of feel. I appreciate hearing that you feel that in a sense for this specific time of year as well.

“Paranoid” – like the themes of basically the rest of the EP, is about me being honest with myself and how badly my OCD induced intrusive thoughts have damaged me throughout my life. I have some pretty bad control issues and one facet of those is the fact that I have a tendency to pre-catastrophize the worst possible outcome in any situation that comes my way. It’s my way of feeling safe just in case anything bad was to ever happen around me where I can just say to myself “well, at least I already anticipated this being the possible result before it happened.”

I’m in the first, healthy and long-term relationship I’ve ever been in and when I was writing this EP, I realized that there were a lot of self-sabotaging tendencies coming up for me behind the scenes. I would nitpick every last detail about my relationship and it would cause conflict, leaving me to reopen some kind of abandonment wound I have inside because I wanted to predict that he would just potentially end up leaving me anyway. In “Paranoid” I’m attempting to confront this about myself, asking myself what’s the worst thing that can happen if someone does leave you? As long as you meet the person with your best and all the love you have in your heart, you can’t force anything beyond that.

I was also watching and rewatching a lot of slasher films around the time I wrote that song so the lyrics and the energy of the track itself is channeled through the mind of a fictional “final girl” running through the woods at night in the slasher film of her own mind. The “slasher” in question is her intrusive thoughts personified.      

2. What does '620' mean to you? I thought maybe it was an area code you were reppin' because I honestly don't know the area codes out here well, haha. But then I search engined that and it said that is like an area code in Kansas. So I was like ,"Is this like a journey to Wonderland thing?"...ha. But then some intrusive AI result told me it might mean twin flames and angel wings/new chapters? That seemed a little more like the vibe of the music.

That result you found is actually very fitting for what Sehseiyah is all about, but I had no idea that it could be a number for angel wings and new chapters haha. 620 is a very literal meaning for June 20th that I later created a whole mythology around as the EP began to materialize into a completed project. I was in the beginning phases of imagining and composing what would end up being a month-long writing process for this EP early last summer and I remember the day– 6/20 being the “aha!” moment where it felt as if stars aligned and all the themes/intentions of this body of work blossomed in my mind.

I don’t know what it was, but there was something kind of magical happening in the air that day and I almost felt like my body and spirit was in a state of euphoria. I wanted to capture that as the essence of what would be the first ever Sehseiyah release. The more I thought about “620” through a lens of world-building, the more apparent it became to me that in the world of Sehseiyah, 620 is a numerical “angel” code that unlocks metamorphosis which is exactly what happened to me when I transitioned out of my decade-long moniker as The Bedroom Witch into what is now, Sehseiyah. 620 made me feel I’ve ascended like an angel. 

3. That's so cool cuz my own new album is releasing this 6/20 and it is the day before my mom's Solstice birthday as well! Anyhow, I love how you blended micro genres on "Out Of Body" which has this hard industrial pop bop vibe mixed with like club EBM feels and this incandescent and floaty vocal. It is like pure dopamine. I love music like this or Bestial Mouths or Caress are other good examples of artists where you can really just lose yourself in it and get taken out of your day or evening into a sort of refuge from or a way to process pain or relax and feel sad/"good". Which fits the song title, kinda. Did you intentionally want to craft a song with a kind of club feeling that implies group celebration but also has a sort of "personal" quality to the intimate vocal?

First off, I love Bestial Mouths and Caress, Caress is a friend who I truly enjoy running into whenever we do at different shows in LA (at least the rare times when I actually decide to leave the house).  And thank you for that perspective on “Out of Body” – that was such a fun track to write even though the themes of that song were kind of painful to dive into lol. I wouldn’t say that the blending of genres was necessarily an intentional choice, it was more so just the way the scenes and pictures moved in my head as I was crafting the structure of that track. The verses in that song are meant to be more introspective and almost carry a ghostly feel to them – that was a choice informed by how I imagined the verses to be narrated through the perspective of an intrusive thought turned into some kind of a ghost/parasite character who’s talking to me in my head and trying to convince me to self-cannibalize in order to free myself from the pain and suffering that comes with being a human.

The explosive “club” like feeling in the chorus section is meant to be an interruption from the intrusive thoughts, almost like I’m swimming back up to the surface and taking a breath and regaining control of my own thoughts again. I think the music itself reflects that in a way, the drawn out meandering of the verses expressing a sorrowful inner world that exists in all of us, while the chorus sections are reflective of how fast-paced and intense the exterior world can feel to move through.  

4. Tell me about your art! I was lurking your insta through my band account and saw some of your paintings/loved them. Especially cool to see some of the  Have you been doing that a long time or is it a recent extension of expression? Do you feel like it is in conversation with your musical side or all came out of you at a certain time in life? Also liked seeing all the faces and floating heads in your work you shared during this weird month of lots of Gemini with Leo and Aries other stuff making everyone all dramatic, lol.

Thanks so much! I’ve been drawing and painting since I was a little kid. I’ve always had a very artistic spirit and I also can’t relax, so for as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawing, singing, playing piano, trying new instruments, dancing around, and just always feeling the need to express myself creatively and put my mind at ease. My parents are Persian-folk musicians/music teachers who I grew up listening to composing together almost every night. My mom started teaching me the piano at like 5 years old or something. My older sister and best friend Sepi is also an artist (musician, writer and filmmaker) so it almost feels like there’s this genetic kind of call to the arts happening in my family. 

There are some crossovers between the themes of my music in conversation with my visual art but I wouldn’t say there’s a direct link between the two. My visual art explores an even deeper mythology that’s happening at all times in my head whereas music does channel that at times, but it’s coming from a more personal, real-life experience type of place. My visual art is inspired by demons, persian myths, spirits and general fantasy worlds that come to me in broken narratives that I’m trying to make sense of through visual dialogue.  And it’s funny you’re mentioning the current signs in the sky, being a Leo sun with a Gemini Mars myself I totally get the flair for drama happening right now lol. 

5. Ha! "Raising Hell" has this awesome like X-Files meets like Front Line Assembly creeping intro and then you sound all low key operatic but kind of laid back at the same time. Do you ever feel a tension between mortality and like, the wide open call of the sky sort of looking down on us? I know that question might sound dorky, lol. But as an artist and not even in an "ego" way, sometimes I feel this like coiled energy inside that goes up to my arms like a desire to want to change the world so bad but you have to also realize you are like one seed in a garden and can just do your best. Idk your song title made me think of that. Like, how do I fuck shit up and raise Hell and make shit cooler and still like survive? What does this song mean to you, if you care to elaborate.

All the time, actually. I don’t think that question is dorky at all. I think about being in this physical form and somehow feeling way too tapped into something beyond the veil, almost like there are these higher powers kind of talking to me or warning me or something at all times. I don’t know if I would call it spirituality and I don’t know how deep you are into astrology, but I heard something about 12th house Jupiter placements having this “guardian angel” kind of energy to them and I definitely think I’ve felt that in my lifetime.

Being in some fucked up situations in my life and an alarm bell going off in my body before it got too weird, then somehow getting out of it and wondering how I did the entire time. I might be going off on a separate tangent from what your question is asking but in short, yes, I know what you’re talking about. I think as artists, we’re extremely sensitive to the pain and suffering of this world. I go into a place of magical thinking because it’s such a powerless feeling to know that there are literal genocides, wars, fascist uprisings, etc. happening all around us and we’re just expected to go to our day jobs and act like everything is fine. It’s not ok and I wish evil power hungry people in this world nothing but the worst every day.

I want to go back to the first part of this question and give major love and appreciation to Angel Marcloid (Fire-Toolz) who mixed and mastered this first Sehseiyah EP. The way she elevated my compositions from how they were when I first sent them over to her to what they became as the final result will be something that forever blows me away and has me in a state of awe. That includes the intro to “Raising Hell” – just from the little additions she snuck into that intro with sound FX and added automation, she managed to somehow read my mind for exactly what I was going for with my mix and ramp up the intensity 100x more. She is an incredible mixing and mastering engineer on top of being a genius musician on her own.

“Raising Hell” thematically is meant to be the climax of the EP. In a way, the entire experience of this EP has that “running from the killer” type of narrative to it, and when I was composing and writing the lyrics for this track, I asked myself – what if the killer who was chasing you this entire time catches up to you and you realize that they’re actually yourself? In a sense, it’s an allegory for my relationship to OCD/intrusive thought/self sabotaging behavioral patterns. I’m talking about finding power in that metaphorical knife in my hand not as a tool that has the potential to harm others/myself, but as a source of power to move through the struggles of this world. I’m saying that I’ve had enough of dimming my own light because I’m so afraid of hurting, I’m raising hell on earth to be louder with a sense of confidence and trust in myself and my relationship to others. If Sehseiyah is all about ascension, the one thing truly keeping me down is me.  

6. So real! That is very interesting because I am a big fan of the death metal band Crisis and Karyn designed their logo in the 90s as a human knife holding two kinves in hand to navigate the world despite hostility. I have a tat of it! How did it feel to be involved in the excellent She/Her TDOV compliation V1 recently? It is obvs such a shit time for the community in this country and as a demiflux person w health issues it has been very draining mentally. So it is cool to see little pockets of solidarity like this comp that aims to lift folx up. How'd you get involved with that release? 

It was a huge honor and I loved the intentions of their compilation/label. They reached out to me and explained the intentions of the compilation in that invitation. They most likely found my work as The Bedroom Witch because when I was asked to be on the compilation, I hadn’t released any of my Sehseiyah tracks yet so I was like I have a new project, can I share that on there? They were so nice and down and of course I was on board as well. I love all the tracks featured by all the other artists on that compilation. The world is really fucked up, I just hope people are reminded to celebrate and appreciate trans/queer art outside of the month of June. Love and celebrate your trans/queer friend every day, the world is really weird for us. 

7. Do you see yourself continuing to make albums and growing into a juggernaut witchy demon and reshaping the Earth in your image or would you settle for being an mysterious, elusive plant lady who is spoken of as one does a cool myth?

I believe in duality and nuance in general so I think I would like to have both haha. I plan to continue making albums forever. At my core I’m an extremely shy and private person so sometimes it feels like I’m using music to explain myself and connect with people without having to speak. At the same time, I want to maintain an air of mystery around me because nothing makes me recede more than people trying to get too close to me. I’m complicated in those ways, sometimes

I think that I’m a walking contradiction but I’ll meet everything I do and every interaction I have with love. Also fuck it, words are spells so I’ll say this too – I want to take over the world in the sense where everyone hears my messages through art and music– whether or not they fuck with it, that’s up to them. I respect it either way.     

Photos: Gabriel Gamboa

#goth #darkwave #losangeles #sehseiyah #underground #popindustrial #astrology #xfiles #art #music #transrights #darkelectronic