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This article looks at 'I Know a Garden', the latest album by Montreal-based songwriter Edwin Raphael, focusing on how it brings together his experiences across India, Dubai and Montreal into a meditation on home and belonging. It highlights the album’s indie and alternative folk sound with chamber-pop elements, and explores themes of childhood, identity, fleeting relationships and an inner sanctum.
Edwin Raphael is a Montreal-based songwriter whose work comes out of a life split across geographies. He was born to Malayali parents from Kerala, grew up in Dubai, and moved to Montreal in his early twenties for university, a shift that placed him inside the city’s indie music scene and shaped the direction of his work. His music leans toward indie folk but draws on a wider palette of Western singer-songwriter traditions, as well as elements of Indian classical music and Eastern melodic structures. That mix comes from his upbringing in a place like Dubai, where he has spoken about feeling a sense of dislocation growing up among people who all carried different ideas of home, and that experience feeds directly into his writing. "I think my sonic identity has always come from existing between different worlds," he notes. "I grew up moving between places and cultures, and music became a way to build something that felt like home, not a physical place, but a feeling. Over time, I’ve stopped trying to fit into a specific genre and instead focused on following instinct, letting songs be as minimal or expansive as they need to be."
The artist started out with early EPs like 'Ocean Walk' and 'Cold Nights', then moved into full-length work with 'Will You Think of Me Later?' and 'Warm Terracotta', gradually building a sound that leans into atmosphere, layered instrumentation, and introspective songwriting. Alongside his releases, he has been active as a touring artist across Canada and the US and has also built his own label, Favourite Library, out of small, intimate shows he hosted in Montreal.
On his latest album, 'I Know a Garden', Edwin Raphael brings together the different lives he has lived across India, Dubai, and Montreal into a record that examines the search for a sense of home. The album sits within indie folk and alternative folk, with a strong chamber-pop presence that fills out the sound through strings, saxophone, synths and intricate layered arrangements. The record plays out like a kind of inner refuge, a space built from memory, myth, and small, half-forgotten moments where past and present sit next to each other. The heart of the record lies in the inner world he built of myth, memory as a child running through forests around his grandmother’s house in India, inventing stories, treating light and nature as something alive. "My mother would tell me stories there, often simple and almost like quiet fables about nature, small creatures, and moments that carried a sense of wonder," he shares. "Over time, those stories began to blur with my own experiences, and I found myself writing from somewhere in between memory and imagination." The album moves through that space, treating each song like a different corner of a garden, where grief, wonder, and the search for oneself overlap.
For this record, Edwin was especially drawn to contrast, pairing very intimate, almost fragile moments with wider, more cinematic textures. A lot of the production, he tells us, came from experimentation, re-amping instruments, letting imperfections stay in, and blending organic sounds with subtle electronic elements. Along with his team, he built a palette of field recordings collected over two years across India, small environmental details that found their way into the songs and helped give that inner world a sense of place. "I was also interested in subtly weaving in melodic ideas inspired by Eastern scales within a more Western songwriting framework, just to see where that tension could lead," he says. "The studio started to feel like an extension of the landscape itself, where sometimes a sound would lead the song rather than the other way around."
Across I Know a Garden, Edwin keeps returning to the same negotiations with belonging. ‘Moonstruck’ navigates the regret over unspoken words while questioning identity and self-worth. ‘Hymn for a Dragonfly’ and ‘A Sunbeam Lent To Us Briefly’ look at how brief people, moments, and connections are, and how they pass, whether you’re ready or not.
'First Time on Earth' and 'Mosaic in the Sun' dive into recognising a strange sense of home within uncertainty and reconstructing a relationship through fragmented memories that appear whole only in hindsight. The artist touches upon religion, family, and the habits formed in childhood, showing how those ideas continue into adult life. "I’ve always had this tendency to mythologize my surroundings, to see meaning and magic in ordinary things. The songs became a way of mapping that landscape, a place where memory is slightly blurred, a little luminous, and constantly shifting.
Edwin is taking I Know a Garden on tour immediately after its release, starting with a show in Mumbai at antiSOCIAL, which also marks his first time performing in India. From there, the tour moves through Canada with venues like The Garrison and La Petite Boîte Noire on the schedule. The run then continues into Europe with shows in London, Zurich and more.
Follow Edwin here.
