Portland-based artist and musician Lila Jarzombek has been steadily building a world of her own through sound. Working under the name Nowhere Flower, her latest album Heat Dome feels both elemental and surreal, tender and scorched. It’s a flickering, home-recorded constellation of guitar sketches, drum machines, flutes, synths, and layered vocal textures that drift more like overheard memories than structured songs. There is a deep sense of place throughout, shaped by rural memories, Pacific Northwest fire seasons, internal dreamscapes, and quiet urgency.
Heat Dome doesn’t draw hard lines between psych-folk, tape collage, and lo-fi punk. Instead, it lets those elements seep into one another. Lila’s voice floats through it all like a melodic ghost, conveying emotion more than narrative—grief, motherhood, ecological anxiety, and strange joy move through the record in waves. We talked about how her years as a visual artist influence her sound, the grounding power of collaboration, and what it means to follow intuition instead of form.
Heat Dome is out now on Digital Regress. Miranda Spatula and Nowhere Flower’s Around and About You is out now on Post Present Medium. And don’t forget Sprogg’s Dark Days Are Coming on Bud Tapes. Lila’s website can be found HERE.
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Let’s go back to the beginning. I’d love to hear about some of your earliest memories of music and sound – are there certain things that stand out to you as memorable or formative from when you were younger? What are some of your first memories related to music?
I had a pretty unique upbringing in rural Rhode Island. My folks bought an old dilapidated barn in the 70’s and my father (he’s a woodworker) has spent his life renovating and working on every detail of the house. At this stage, it’s like a kind of living sculpture. All the innovative and beautiful woodwork detail, the history of how the place has been changed and re-configured are in there. The sounds of my Dad working – hammering, cutting wood, sawing, sanding – are deeply ingrained. In junior high and high school I worked in a kind of curio/Reggae music shop near the beach in Rhode Island called Small Axe. It was a community gathering place for my family. I fell in love with reggae/dub music there. First Reggae loves were King Tubby and Jackie Mittoo!
When did you start playing an instrument? And from there, what made you want to start making and playing your own music?
We had some instruments around the house, mainly an old piano, a classical guitar, and some wooden flutes. I took piano lessons (I was 9 or so) and stuck with it for a while – like 7 years – I loved playing piano. In high school, I picked up the guitar and played here and there too, managing to teach myself some chords and scales. When I moved out and left for college I stopped playing. At that time, I was way more interested in making art. I didn’t start playing music again until my mid-20s, once I was out of school. During art grad school a new world of music totally opened up to me thanks to Jeff, my partner (who I met in school). He introduced me to a lot. He has wildly eclectic tastes, but it was some guitar music we listened to that really captured my attention. Listening to John Fahey, Robbie Basho, Popol Vuh, Estribou + Pickens, Bert Jansch & John Renbourn completely blew my mind and inspired me to pick up the guitar again. I became really focused on learning how to play guitar soli. I found playing guitar to be a deeply meditative practice and it was a lot easier for me to be expressive with music than with my words! Thinking through experience and translating ideas into sounds – connecting sound to memory… This desire to connect feelings and emotions with sound is what has kept me interested in playing guitar for all these years.
I’m also curious about when you started painting and doing visual art, and how that part of your creative practice has influenced or inspired your sound-related work?
I grew up obsessively making arty things by hand and I have been painting for as long as I can remember. I went to undergrad for painting & printmaking and then studied painting for my MFA. For the last 15 years or so, I’ve had a “serious art practice” – working on paintings, drawings, prints and collages. But I’ve always had my guitar in the studio. Music and visual art have been on parallel paths for years each intermittently getting attention. Since I’m self-taught at the guitar, I am less bogged down with all the formal training that I have had with art, and I find it totally freeing to play. I’d say that for a really long time, my visual art was pretty heavily influenced by musical ideas coming from drone and raga music (musicians like Pandit Pran Nath, LaMonte Young, and early Terry Riley). Working with repetition and patterns, I wanted to make visual fields that altered your state of mind, creating a kind of visual vibration. With music, I’ve been getting deeper into the process of recording. I love how limitless sonic space feels and it’s cool to work without any explicit visual associations. I do think a lot about drone and making sounds that may have the potential to heal/transform/transmit alter states… I don’t know if that is actually happening in the music, it’s really all just about experimentation at the moment and more connected to my memories.
In the last 3 years, I made a major pivot away from art to focus exclusively on music. This shift was really due to the way that music has brought community and collaboration into my life in a way that art never has or could. In 2023, I joined ‘The Spatulas, the first real band that I played in that actually practiced weekly and played shows. I had never played on stage before playing with them (our first show was wayyy intimidating – opening a big gig for Liz Harris’s band Helen). Since 2019, I’ve played in an improvised guitar duo with my friend, Bob Desaunliers. We played our first show in 2023. Bob is a super-talented multi-instrumentalist – he’s been in a number of projects and bands (prob best known as a member of Lithics) over the years. We actually have a forthcoming tape of guitar duo recordings from the last 4 years of collaboration coming out soon! Look for its release on C/Site (Stefan Christensen’s label) this summer.
When did Nowhere Flower start? It’s such a fantastic band/project name, by the way!
Thanks! I guess it officially became my solo project name in the Spring of 2024 with the first release I did on Radical Documents, a tape called ‘Ruts the Place’. Back in 2018, I had a painting show called Nowhere Flower. It’s a name that I kept returning to when I was thinking about a solo project.
Your latest record, Heat Dome, feels like an immersive world of its own. What inspired the sonic and thematic landscapes of this record?
All the tracks on Heat Dome were recorded in 2023/2024. I’ve lived in the PNW for over a decade now and after experiencing smoke & fires in 2020 and a heat dome in 2021, it’s hard to ignore the anxieties of impending weather threats like our fire season/heat domes/and recurring drought. 2024 was a really hard year, witnessing a genocide in Gaza in real time… Anxieties about dystopian futures, reflections on nature and collapse, being a mother in this era, meditations on landscape are all themes that were entering into the music as I was recording. There is definitely a sense of impending doom on Heat Dome, but also some hope.
There is this great sonic contrast in a lot of these songs, from the rhythmic elements and grooves to this airiness or lightness in the instrumentation. How do you approach that contrast when writing and arranging your songs?
Thanks! That sonic contrast isn’t always intentional and I think it’s a result of having a really loose approach to making the songs. Some of these songs came together fast, others took months of getting them where I wanted them. Most of the tracks on Heat Dome were treated like a collage, structured around really early recordings of guitar like the songs Dot and Patched Piece. These recordings were made on various formats; cheap tape players, handheld recorders, old iPhones, and a Tascam digital 8 track. I like the way these songs all have their own specific character and quality and think it’s due to how they were captured in the recording process. I’m always searching for those unique sounds. I have a collection of instruments that I’ve been carrying around with me since my youth; bamboo flutes, penny whistles, and violin. I have a lot of sentimental attachment to these instruments and love experimenting with how I record them… using contact mics and distortion pedals – sometimes their tones become almost unidentifiable distorted, which I like to try and weave into the songs, adding to that contrast and dimension.
The album has a diverse patchwork of sounds—guitar, synthesizer, fiddle, drum machines, melodica, and more. How do you decide which textures to use in a given track?
I’ve got a real simple/and spartan recording setup here now with the Tascam 244 4-track and I’m teaching myself a lot about recording as I go. When I make ‘songs’ I definitely like working with tones that aren’t expected and necessarily sweet sounding, if that makes sense. A lot of these songs are a result of experimentation, but I do try to set limits, create boundaries, so things don’t get too fussy or overwrought. At the end of the day, it’s really all about finding the feeling within each song.
Beyond that, I really appreciate how you incorporate and shape vocals within the context of this music. Do you approach your voice as an instrument in the same way as your guitar or synths?
Most definitely as an instrument! For me, singing over a track is about adding texture more than it is about telling a story with lyrics. At least for now… I never in a million years thought I’d be singing when I started recording music. I am still figuring out how to use my voice and get results I like.
Can you tell me a little about your project Sprogg, with Emmet Martin? How did you all start making music together? Dark Days Are Coming is great. Are there more tunes in the pipeline?
Emmett is one of the busiest musicians I’ve met, with a really great tape label called Bud Tapes. It’s hard to keep up! I met Emmet shortly after the release of my first tape. Emmet reached out to see if Nowhere Flower wanted to play a show with Shelter (from Olympia) and The Free Water Shrew Ensemble (Emmett’s free jam/improvised project/s). There’s a really exciting scene of musicians in Portland and Olympia doing improvised music. They are forming a really cool community around making free music. It’s been great connecting to that and also to what’s going on up in Olympia around Max (Nordile) – Shelter Music, Time Addict, Yard Sale For World Peace, etc. all rad stuff!
This past summer Emmet and I started playing music together. We occasionally free jam and the Sprogg tape was a release of one of those sessions. I also formed a band (originally called Nowhere Flower Group) with Skyler Pia (bass), Jon Grothman (drums, drum machine), and Emmet (keys). We initially set out to play Nowhere Flower songs but we just renamed the band to Blurries, so we can all write material together now as a band.
Does collaboration with other musicians influence the way you approach your solo work?
Yeah definitely. With the solo stuff, I can go at my own pace and channel whatever thoughts come in. These days, all the people that I collaborate with are really seasoned musicians with their own unique processes and approaches to making music. I’ve learned a ton about songwriting from Miranda and playing with Bob as an improvised guitar duo is like the other side of the spectrum. Collaborating with others has taught me to slow down, listen more carefully, and to be more deliberate about what I’m doing.
And on the subject of collaboration, you also recently released Around and About You with Miranda Spatula. Can you tell me a little about your and Miranda’s history?
Miranda is such a special person. We met in the fall of 2022 and hit it off right away, connecting through music. Miranda had just moved to Portland and was looking for a lead guitarist to play in her project, the Spatulas. A mutual friend and super-talented musician, Kyle Raquipiso (of the band Scorch), connected us. I played guitar in the Spatulas for about a year, until Miranda moved away to Boston. Right before she left town, we recorded the album, ‘Beehive Mind’ & the ‘March Chant’ cassette in one weekend at Red Lantern Studios. It was cool to have a record of our year playing together with Kyle R. on drums and Jon G. on bass. Around the same time I joined the Spatulas, I started getting into recording and working on my solo project. It was a bummer when Miranda moved and the Spatulas ended. I missed playing music with her. Miranda and I wanted to keep our musical connection alive so we started “trading tracks” back and forth. Around and About You is a result of a lot of things I wrote solo. Most of those tracks were fully formed songs but I could never get them where I wanted so I stripped them down to instrumentals to see what Miranda would do to them. It was a cool process and hopefully, something that we keep up.
In relation to this record, but also your solo work, what role does spontaneity play in your creative process? Are there moments in the recording where you surprised yourself?
Spontaneity is the underlying system of how I work. I never write guitar riffs or plan anything out! Most of the recordings come from improvising in the moment and riffing on ideas which leads to a lot of surprise. I hit record and see what happens. It’s the most direct way to connect with emotions & feelings which I want to capture in the recording process. This way of working tends to generate a lot of material, so I spend a good deal of time going back and extracting the best parts but usually editing out most of what was recorded. It also has its drawbacks – Sometimes, I can’t remember how I made a song or guitar line and occasionally it can be almost impossible to get back to that original place. That has created a real challenge for trying to play these songs live solo and with other people in a band.
And to close, as always, what are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
I’ll narrow it down to a few things I’ve been listening to recently:
Las Barbas Indómitas – Vols. 1-3
Stefan Christensen – In Time
Tony Pasquarosa’s projects (but specifically): The eye – breaking the psychic hold
Kryssi & Wednesday – Ogden Garden
Cuneiform Tabs – S/T – 2024
Lori Vambe – Space time dream time Comp.
Usurabi’s latest – Chita – (I’m super inspired by Toshimitsu Akiko!)
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