Fans of experimental electro legends Grimes and Bjork will love Waterflower and her atmospheric new album ‘Balta Gaisma’. Never afraid to stray away from societies musical expectations, Latvia-based Waterflower has already turned heads due to her dreamy soundscapes and unique use of plants and flowers to generate musical tones. Using her music to encourage self expression and championing the LGBTQ+ community, her backlog of tracks show her creativity and willingness to push boundaries that has allowed her to stand out from the crowd.
“Baroque pop, dream and noise-making from a Baltic perspective. Traditions of poetry and nature worship and how these interweave with contemporary art”
Jude Cowan Montague – The Newsagents – Resonance FM
‘Balta Gaisma’ features six tunes and opens with the gentle title track. With an almost nautical entrance sound, Waterflower holds a running theme of a connection to nature before introducing a striking, electronic beat and haunting vocals, setting the tone for the rest of the album. This then fades into her punchy anthem ‘Find It!’ which features inspirational lyrics inspired by 80s Madonna, concerning the importance of being unapologetically yourself. This is all set to a galactic soundscape of jarring electro beats. ‘Internal’ and ‘Zem Ūdens’ project a heavenly sound, allowing us to hear more of Waterflower’s impressive vocals, while still maintaining her stylistic tone. The funky ‘Palm vs Palm’ is accompanied by a uniquely filmed music video that you can watch here, showing her passion and connection to nature. The album draws to a close with the touching track ‘Love’, showing a more vulnerable side to Waterflower through careful lyricism and her ability to create a gentle, dreamlike soundscape.
“On stage, Sabine Moore, the soul of the Waterflower project, looks like Mary Antoinette, descended from space and painted by the Pre-Raphaelites.”
Paulina Drėgvaitė, 15min.It
Waterflower’s training in art is obvious through her ability to blend visuals and music into a stunning showcase of her talents. This is especially prevalent in her live shows where she works with live plants, either extracting their ‘generated melodies’ via electromagnetic pulses or sometimes even using them as a ‘living keyboard’, showing that her way of working is worlds away from your average producer. Speaking of her creative influences and experiences with art, Waterflower explained:
“As a conceptual artist I use many symbols, but one of my favourite art techniques for performance is something like Brian Eno’s creative strategy – to create a mechanism, run it, and see what happens. I start my Waterflower shows by connecting nearby plants. I never know how they will behave before the show, or how they will react to my touch. Experiments with different plant species intrigue me greatly.
I started working with plant synthesizers in 2015, when I saw the Kickstarter project for the Ototo synthesizer. I decided that this is what (..) “Waterflower” is all about, playing with plants as synthesizer keys. The technology used in Ototo also works with other materials, but plants are my choice. The other plant synthesizer I use is a MIDI Sprout. It measures the electromagnetic changes (impulses) in a plant and turns them into notes. Then it is up to me to find the most suitable instrument for these sound patterns. In each concert space, these plants create different melodies – I am very interested in that.”
Waterflower
Intrigued? Follow Waterflower on social media to discover more about this experimental instrumentalist.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WaterflowerMusic
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_water_flower/
Website: http://www.waterflower.lv
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/waterflower
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3hC37A4FC6LS41h5E7VUk7
Youtube: youtube.com/waterflower
Bandcamp: https://waterflower.bandcamp.com/