LOTUS

MUSIC

Nov 3

Astrophe is proud to debut LISTEN, the first solo single from 17 year old Darwin-based musician Lotus.

Lotus, full name Meera Lotus Boehme, may be just 17 but her voice and lyrics carry the weight of lifetimes. Of mixed heritage — Sri Lankan on her mother’s side, with her lineage tracing Dutch, Spanish, French and Portuguese due to the colonisation of Sri Lanka by European settlers, she explains, and Australian with British lineage on her father’s side.

Lotus is the only musician in her family, but grew up in a creative environment on her family’s 20 acre farm in Darwin. Through a constant stream of backpackers staying on the property, she was exposed from an early age to people of many different cultures, lifestyles and religions and creativity through many forms of art and music. Both of her parents were hippies — before her mother Tamara met her father she travelled around Australia with her boyfriend, making a living selling crochet bikinis and dresses and handmade clothes, and was always sketching and painting with pastels and watercolour. Her father David grew up with the hippie scene in Byron, working with horses on a farm and creating pottery and stained glass artworks, and her older sister Yasmin is an artist working with paint and tattooing.

Listen is Lotus’ first solo single, recently self-released on Spotify. “It’s a song about growing up and the way friendships are formed and change as life goes on”, Lotus explains. “It is about a deep friendship, with a girl named Renna. She was the first girl I ever had a crush on, but it was never that type of relationship. We were good friends for many years but I felt that there wasn’t good communication and it became one sided and the friendship ended. Well, we are still acquaintances, but not close like we were. We are both following our own different life paths, with different boyfriends and girlfriends, and developing as people in our teenage years”.

For Lotus, music is an outlet for dealing with trauma. Her lyrics are always freestyled, and through this stream of consciousness she has an outlet for processing what she is going through, her feelings and life. “For me, music is a storybook… a really beautiful storybook that you listen to, in a way it lets you finish a chapter in your life and release so many things that you wish you could have said to someone, or want to. If I’m angry, hurt or upset, I can tell that person through my music even if I can’t tell them in person. Or if I need to tell myself something, I can do that through music too. Music provides release in so many different ways, and its such an open ended thing that everybody who listens to can interpret and apply their own experience to that too”.

These shots were taken by Sydney photographer Aaron VIII in Port Macquarie NSW, where they both have family living. Lotus visits from Darwin usually once per year to visit her fathers side of her family. Their next project together will be the music video for Listen which has been on hold due to the lockdowns but will be premiered on Astrophe in the near future.

You can see more about Lotus here / Listen here // Lotus shot, styled & words by Aaron VIII / Beauty: Chelsea Shay

CAMILLA & MARC dress / ARMS OF EVE earrings / JEAN RILEY necklace / ELKA COLLECTIVE knit / SARAH J CURTIS hat / JEAN RILEY necklace / ELKA COLLECTIVE shirt / ELKA COLLECTIVE pants