REVIEW: Waterflower “White Light” – Music

Earlier this week, the extravagant Latvian audiovisual music project “Waterflower”, personalized by experimental electronic music artist and multimedia designer Sabine Moore, and her new album “White Light” – its presentation last week took place at the floating cultural center “Noass”, but then only the vinyl format of this work was still available.

The songs have been created over the last five years, touring fifteen European countries. Unfortunately, under the influence of Covid-19, Sabine had to cancel all subsequent foreign concert tours this year, but it happened to everyone. “The title of the album symbolizes the elusive quality of light – white, colorless light clearly shows everything that is in the viewers’ field of vision. With the album, the artist is not ashamed to show herself and invites listeners not to be afraid, to share and develop her creative expressions, even if they are in a non-standard form. The artist acknowledges her belonging to Latvian culture, despite the fact that the album mostly sings in English, ”informs the team of the project“ Waterflower ”.

The avant-garde electronics audiovisual project “Waterflower” was created in 2006 and is one of the first projects in Latvia in which a woman worked independently in electronic music. Within the framework of this project, six digital albums have been published, the last three of which have been released on audio cassettes. The last cassette was shown in December 2019 – it was a joint EP with the Estonian counterpart Spice Mouse. And a little more from Waterflower’s messages: One of the Waterflower’s stage tools is live plants, to which sensors are added that will read variable conductivity (created by the moving water content, similar to the nervous system in animals and humans) and convert it into midi music. signals. Using this technique, the melody is determined only by the impulses of the plant and how the plant responds to the environment or the person who touches it by stimulating it. […] Since 2015, the artist has been playing live plants in the Waterflower project, turning them into touch-sensitive synthesizers. Often the songs are made up of natural noises, household items, electronic instruments, violin and piano sounds. The concerts are accompanied by real-time video animations created by the artist, whose graphic character and flexible movements resonate with the Art Nouveau-inspired stage image. ” Even on the spot in Noah, it was not clear what Sabine was really doing with the plants on the stage, so let more competent people deal with this issue – but you can simply listen to the album in the same way…

BY. In total, the album contains ten “avant-pop” style compositions, which seem to be different from each other, but nevertheless, they stick together very well, so the album does not create a jerky impression. Interest in this work arises already after its title song with its ghostly hypnotic leitmotif – it is true that for this reason Sabine’s vocal material is the weakest in this composition. However, the most compellingly understandable from the composer’s point of view was “Psalm Vs Psalm”, as well as “Find It!” Also – close to pop music, completely funny “Under the Water”. In summary: a very interesting project and also its album, but in person and “live” this sound material sounds even more interesting.

PRICE. For the non-electronically prepared ear “White Light” will be (is) a rather indigestible music product. This is especially true of the second half of the album, with compositions such as “Dawning” and “Internal”, the latter of which is also performed in a mixed language, ie in Latvian and English (or vice versa), for reasons that are not yet understood.

Sandris Vanzovičs

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