Sophia Hansen-Knarhoi - Wildflowers (2022) Hi Res

‘Wildflowers’ is a delicate, intimate look at the bridge between Sophia’s childhood and womanhood, and how it feels to stand on the precipice of knowing yourself. It explores how love and trauma are entangled with identity, and how we allow these things to tighten or unravel as we move through life. Sophia, Currently based in London, has spent most of her life in Perth, Western Australia. She is a vocalist/cellist/guitarist who started her path in the music industry in sound design and composition for contemporary dance and theatre. “I love to see how music and movement interact, and how the two can grow side by side during the process of making a work. The track ‘Wildflowers’ was adapted from a dance piece I worked on. I think being able to physically see the choreography, the gentleness and lightness of movement, I began to see a world of sound evolve from it. The harp in this track was a result of this, it propels you like a body moving through space.”

Combining influences of ‘Julia Holter’ with elements of ambient folk, gospel and chamber pop, Sophia recorded with the help of some friends from university. She borrowed mics from anyone who had them, and either home recorded, or found space with the instrumentalist. “It was a lot of figuring out how to make everything sound good through trial and error, I was studying sound recording at the time so was able to use a studio space when it was free. The day we recorded ‘What I Knew’, my friend Liam was helping me track guitar and we somehow accidentally managed to get his talkback coming through my guitar amp, it took us 3 takes to realize it was in the recording. In ‘Wildflowers’ part way through you can hear a bird chirp outside my window. For the background vocals, I accidentally recorded them through my laptop microphone. I ended up loving these little imperfections, I think they make the music feel more human.”

‘Disguise’ explores our tendency to project our love onto somebody we know doesn’t have the capacity to return it, and how we hold on to a safe yet false sense of identity through these relationships. It highlights the clarity Sophia felt the more distance she placed between herself and this person."I was going through a time in my life where I was struggling to fill the gaps in who I was, so I tried to fill them with the wrong people. I believed I could find what I needed outside of myself. This attached sense of identity was like my disguise, from myself."

‘The Sea’ chronicles the loss of Sophia’s childhood self, its hypnotic pulse pulling you into the ocean’s wake. Written at the precipice of womanhood, this dialogue with her younger self reveals the pieces left behind, and the trauma and pain that follow her still. “I wrote The Sea when I finally found the answers I needed from my younger self. I had been deeply wounded by some experiences in my late teens, before I had even started to find my feet as a woman. Following some relationship fallout in my life, I started to discover this damage I had left unexamined, and began to understand the hurt I’d held inside for a long time.”

‘What I knew’ takes us through a journey of introspection after a break up, In the first section of the song, we can feel the venerability, the tenderness off a freshly broken heart, and the self consciousness that comes along with it, ‘Was it my hands you meant to meet?’. “I was in a whirlwind love that swept me off my feet, and then it came crashing down in my periphery. After the breakup, I wondered, maybe it wasn’t me that he was with, maybe I was a vessel for someone lost.” The second section of the song was written 6 months later, a retrospection “I’m a big fan of slow songwriting, this EP took me 2 years to write because I wanted to allow myself the time to feel however many ways I needed to about my life at the time, I didn’t want to rush into knowing exactly how I felt. I want the listener to be able to hear the time passing, hear the balance shifting in my perspective.”

The title track ‘Wildflowers’ captures that feeling of release from the tethers that bind you to your past, and those who occupy it. It’s a melancholic relief from the love and pain we feel for something that has let us go. “Finding closure when there is no one on the other end can be difficult. It can take a lot of time, and self loathing. I picked apart a relationship in such meticulous detail, only to find that what was behind it was a version of myself that I needed to let go of.”