Florist & Mirah.
Shot & Written by: Eva Lynch
December 15, 2022
Brooklyn, NY @ Pioneer Works
The night started with the soft tones of Mirah, accompanied by a harpist, who is a singer/songwriter currently based in Brooklyn on the same label as Florist. The harmonized guitar and harp gave the music a whimsical feel, as Mirah set the scene for the night with her confident voice and indie-folk influence. Her acoustic sound incorporates uncommon instruments, such as the accordion and harp in an experimental fashion, as she pushes the genres she plays into.
For one of my first concerts in New York, I can only describe this night as my Brooklyn initiation. The refurbished hall of Pioneer Works, a revamped cultural center in what used to be the historic Pioneer Iron Works factory in the heart of Red Hook, was filled all manner of relaxed 20 year olds, who sat and lay on the heated concrete floors, making the show all the more intimate, some even closing their eyes to the gentle sounds of Florist.
It took a few starts at the beginning to make sure the loops were just right, before the band humbly continued to build up the delicate sound. The final sound was such a precise and gentle musical balance, you could tell how much care had gone into crafting each sound. The performance offered the crowd a moment of peace and calm. It was a
night of gentle escapism, as even the lead singer spent the night imagining she was just playing back at the band’s happy place, in their shed-turned-jam room in upstate New York. The show was filled with mysticism and vulnerability as Florist played through their songs from their latest self-titled record, Florist. For this album, the quartet consisting of Emily Sprague, Jonnie Baker, Rick Spataro and Felix Walworth, all rented a house
together in the Hudson Valley where they lived together and recorded the album on the porch together every morning to create a highly collaborative volume of songs.
Released in 2022, the album uses found sounds to create what’s been called an ‘audio documentary’ that produces an almost meditative state, in its gentle and artful exploration of how musicians can collaborate with nature as a musical partner. Sprague said in an interview with Pitchfork that she was “interested in words being more—like a
sentence saying a hundred emotions, and being five words long,” using straightforward or experimental lyrical approaches to create a large image open to interpretation. Her own personal work is wordless ambient soundscapes, so the introduction of lyrics in her work for Florist to create their gentle folk and country inspired indie sound, plays with the way lyrics actually impact how one listens to the music and it compliments the instrumentals. Their latest album features songs with names such as “Duet for Guitar and Rain,” “River’s Bed,” and “Feathers,” showing the natural influences for the music off of Florist in both its soundscapes and instrumentalism as well as its poetic lyrics, many detailing vulnerable feelings and intimately personal accounts or confessions as if takenstraight from Sprague’s diary.
The gentle sound has been carefully crafted, and Florist's latest album is a testament to their time and commitment to building up detail and layering soft sounds to evoke feelings beyond words that remain otherwise unarticulated and uncaptured.