Faithfulness to the living music • No compromise
“Our goal has always been faithfulness to the original music source — capturing the living essence of the performance without processing or compromise.”
— Kavichandran Alexander
From its founding in 1984, Water Lily Acoustics has been guided by a single overriding principle: to record beautiful music with the highest degree of fidelity and resolution possible.
We believe that the artistry of the world’s greatest musicians — especially the master musicians of the East — deserves to be preserved in its purest form. For too long, many Eastern masters had been recorded with insufficient care for sound quality. Water Lily was created to change that.
We employ only the simplest, most accurate microphone techniques — primarily the **Blumlein configuration** (two figure-of-eight microphones crossed at 90 degrees). We also occasionally use ORTF or M/S when appropriate.
Our approach is strictly two-channel from beginning to end. We use:
We never record in dead, acoustically neutral studios. Instead, we carefully select beautiful, naturally reverberant spaces — churches, halls, and rooms whose acoustics enhance rather than obscure the music. The goal is to capture not just the instruments, but the living performance in real space and time.
“Simple mic techniques, high quality gear, short signal paths and absolutely no processing of any kind at any stage.”
— Kavichandran Alexander
This purist philosophy results in recordings that possess a unique sense of presence, dimensionality, and emotional truth. Listeners often describe Water Lily releases as having an almost holographic quality — the musicians feel palpably present in the room.
Our recordings are not “produced” in the conventional sense. They are captured. The alchemy of the masters moving molecules of air is preserved by moving particles of iron (analog tape) so that the poetry of the ancients can echo into the future.
Water Lily recordings are prized by audiophiles and music lovers worldwide for their verisimilitude — their faithfulness to the original musical event. They are not just documents of performances; they are living experiences.