I Chased The Water: A Sacred Offering to the Great Sea

For the past five years, a local woman by the name of Sabarah Pilon who goes by the stage name DenMother, has been working on music. On September 17 2024, DenMother released her album I Chased The Water. According to DenMother, she prepared this album by meditating and performing rituals along the Atlantic Shore for six months. When I asked why she did this she responded with: 

“I’m a forest person, and I never really spent enough time by the ocean. And since we lived so close of the ocean, I felt a calling.” During this time she was praying to an abstract entity known as the Goddess. The Goddess to my knowledge is a being of one’s own femininity. She also prays to the Goddess with the help of two goddesses from the Sumerian pantheon, Inanna and Erishkigal, as well as Venus, the Roman equivalent of the Greek goddess Aphrodite, the goddess of love.

She went on to further state that the intention of her album was humanity and our “ancestral connection to mythology having to do with the ocean.” She ended up not writing about mythology and sailors, but instead wrote about her devotion to the sea, leading to her meditating along the Fundy Coast in nature across NB, including Blacks Harbour. In fact, her music video and album cover are at the Irving Nature Park in Saint John, Canada’s oldest incorporated city. She plans to continue working on her music, combining her work life and music life instead of keeping them separate as she has for the past five years.

The music in DenMother’s album is within the techno genre, yet at the same time it is not. It incorporates the sounds of the ocean with DenMother periodically singing in the background. The techno does not have a hard-hitting sound in the track and is more something you can fall asleep or meditate to. While it is not loud or traditional, there is beauty in the work and sounds she has made. 

DenMother frequently plays sets at Flourish Festival and on November 1 2024 she will be playing a set at the CAP in Fredericton, NB.