Carla Malrowe

Carla Malrowe is an alternative musician from South Africa who has made her home in The Netherlands. She is a songwriter, producer, pianist and singer with a vast love for drum machine plugins, screeching electric violins and lyrics that are unapologetically macabre and melancholic. It’s difficult to subscribe to her music to any specific genre due to her approach.

Through exposing the complex love-hate relationship between the synthetic and the organic, digital and analogue, and modern with classical she creates sharp juxtapositions in her songs that emphasize sonic binaries and their baffling co-existence. Electro-pop, indie alternative, freak-folk and a hint of dark wave are genres that all show face in her music.

She subscribes to the cyclical effect of art inspiring art. Artists that are most inspirational to Malrowe's compositions are Bjork, Cocteau Twins, Grimes and Son Lux, where’s on a poetic/lyrical level it’s been, and always will be, her first love, Leonard Cohen.
She also draws inspiration from art forms such as fiction writing and film. Examples include ​​Låt den rätte komma in by John Ajvide Lindqvist and Frankenstein by Mary Shelly. Creativity, she experiences, as a lifeline. “I create, whether it is a piece of music, a poem, a smoothie or an outfit. I create because I can’t not. I don’t know how.”