Waterflower releases new album “Digiplantcore”

Sabīne Moore, the Riga-based Latvian artist behind the avant-garde electronic project Waterflower, has put out a new studio album, “Digiplantcore”. It is presented as a collision of ecological awareness, plant and mushroom music, and digital hardcore. It follows the project's previous album, “All Art Is Ecological”, released in 2023.

Creation and themes

According to the artist, the demo versions of the songs were played and developed on DIY (self-organised) concert tours in Asia, the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe. She describes the sound as distorted, shrieking and chaotic, yet danceable. The songs deal with extinction, overconsumption, self-destruction and the urge to keep moving forward while the world grows less stable.

The album contains eight tracks. The review singles out “Art Bitch”, with its very fast rhythm, the industrial-electronic “Honesty” and “Gentrifier”, which has acid house traits. The reviewer notes that the record is loud and harsh, and names as a drawback that almost half an hour of such sound could prove exhausting for an unprepared listener.

Cassette release

Sometime in October, the Bristol-based British label Avon Terror Corps plans to release “Digiplantcore” on audio cassette. Several earlier works by the project, which has around eight digital albums in total, have also come out on cassette.

About the project

Waterflower was founded in 2006 and is considered one of the first projects in Latvia in which a woman worked independently in electronic music. The album “Balta gaisma” (2020) was nominated for the Latvian music recording industry's Golden Microphone (“Zelta mikrofons”) award in the alternative or experimental music category. A distinctive feature of the project is that live plants and mushrooms serve as instruments on stage: biosensors read their biodata and turn it into sound.