Music made in
unusual places
Mel·lif·lu·ous is Vancouver artist Lara Kroeker’s experimental music project, combining violin, voice and electronics. Her work explores place, travel and experimentation, from Iceland to Japan.
She emitted a low, melodious sound, a kind of mellifluous howl.
I’m Lara, a violinist and electronic musician. I use violin and voice as my starting point, building songs live with loops on the Push 3. My work blends acoustic and electronic sound—layering, stretching, and reshaping it into something immersive. I’ve released three albums and continue to explore new ways of performing and composing through technology.
Wildroot & Amber
A body of work shaped by memory, objects, and the quiet rituals of everyday life.
Wildroot & Amber is an album shaped by rice fields, ritual, and the quiet rhythms of Japan. In May 2025, I traveled to Itoshima for an artist residency, walking each day past fields and sea while carrying fragments of my past — letters, home videos, remembered voices — into the studio.
Layered with field recordings gathered there, these materials became five songs that move between the intimate and the elemental. The earth keeps memory; beneath thought, something older hums. To remember is not to think, but to return.
The project extends into an interactive installation inspired by the apothecary — bottles as vessels, not of remedies but of memory. Glass jars release voices, wind, and water, folding fragments directly into the music.
Together, the songs and installation form a sonic shelf of traces — each piece a container for what might otherwise be lost.
Spákonufell
An album shaped by solitude, snow, and the strange magic of Iceland.
In February and March 2023, I traveled to Skagaströnd, a remote town in northwestern Iceland, for an artist residency that would transform the way I make music. Each morning, I opened my window to the mountain Spákonufell—rising through frost.
During my time there, I wrote and recorded this album in the freezer of an abandoned fish factory, surrounded by creaking pipes, frozen air, and the silence of deep winter. It was strange and beautiful. Spákonufell is both a place and a feeling.
A call into the unknown. A whisper from the land.
The mountain itself appears on the album cover in artwork by the incredible Lena J. Fahlén, whose vision captures the haunting quiet and deep magic of the landscape.
Talking to the Trees
Songs shaped by forest, collaboration, and listening closely to what’s already there.
Born from a quiet walk beneath the branches, Talking to the Trees carries the echo of ivy winding its way toward destruction, and the steady devotion of a friend who would not let the forest fall silent.
Sasha’s care for the trees became the seed of this work—an invocation to listen more deeply, to honor what stands rooted among us.
Every sound in this project begins in the wild: the rustle of leaves, the resonance of wood, the voice and violin bent and reshaped until they blur into something otherworldly. Nature becomes instrument, memory becomes music, and poetry weaves through it all like a low, enduring current.
This is not just a collection of sounds, but a listening practice—an invitation to hear the living breath of the forest.
The spaces between things.
I’m Lara Kroeker, a Vancouver-based violinist, vocalist and experimental composer. I go by Mel·lif·lu·ous.
My background is in classical music, but my work now combines violin, voice, electronics, loops and found sounds. I create music that moves between acoustic and electronic sound, often responding to the places and environments where I’m making it.
Before returning to music, I spent more than 20 years working as a designer and creative director. That experience continues to influence how I approach making music, particularly my interest in structure, experimentation and bringing different elements together.
In recent years, I’ve developed new work through artist residencies in Iceland and Japan. In Iceland, I recorded music in a remote fish factory. In Itoshima, Japan, I experimented with sound, electronics and installation.
My work is about exploring sound, place and process, and finding new ways to bring together the instruments, technology and ideas that interest me.
