Boombox Blitz: Daniel Norgren captures diamond-shod beauty in ‘The Flow’

Welcome to Boombox Blitz, an artist spotlight series showcasing overlooked singers, songwriters and musicians who are quietly taking over the world.

Nature is as a blank slate. It’s untouched by man-made endeavors, allowing the water, the sun, the wind, the trees to live and breath in a normal, pristine state. The canvas is stripped clean, and the vibrant white blast penetrates the eyes and the soul of those who dare enter its sphere. Folk storyteller Daniel Norgren trudges boldly, yet cautiously, into the muddy territory with his new video “The Flow,” a languid piece constructed to dig into your skin and worm right into the bone marrow. “I’m bumming around, trying to find the flow,” he mutters to piano accompaniment and the soft trickle of percussion, as the visual displays the caramel ripple of a water’s fluffed surface.

Filmed on his own, the video is a stunningly-woven artwork depicting the simplistic beauty and grandeur embedded right at his fingertips. “I often return to an old, abandoned flour mill in the woods, not far from where I live,” Norgren, of Swedish heritage, says of the recording. “I’ve recorded that wooden floor in there so many times. The mill water rushes right underneath, and the hiss tone changes a lot depending on the daily water level. Sometimes I bring a camera or a phone.”

So, the sequence, sometimes crystalline-shaped, other times granular and shifty, is a profound reminder to embrace what Mother Nature has bestowed upon us lowly creatures. Images of various states of being ⏤ the water shifting between the free-flowing fountain over a cliff and a drippy, icy cylinder ⏤ drag the viewer along for a joyous, but somehow melancholic, escape through the expansive woodlands and its emerald green countryside. “Bumming around waiting for the train / Sleeping on the cold cold ground in the pouring rain,” he splits from himself, casting a long shadow and nearly living outside of his own body. Later, he observes such a distance, “Skin and bone, a long way from home…”

“The Flow” anchors Norgren’s forthcoming album, Wooh Dang, out April 18.

Watch below:

Follow Norgren on his socials: Facebook