photo by Jace

ROSEWATER is 23-year-old Elyse Cohen. She grew up in a stupid ass town called Eagle, Idaho, and graduated Summa Cum Laude from Oregon State University in 2025 with a degree in Computer Science. Computer Systems, to be specific, and a minor in Music. Which means she's pretty autistic. Just putting that out there.

You might think Elyse ended up doing music for realsies because they couldn't find a computer science job in this economy. Haha wrong!! They actually landed what was supposed to be their dream job at Microsoft which was cool cuz it made a lot of money. But then they actually had no mental energy left at the end of the day to do anything creative they wanted, like, music. And as a creative they were kind of pissed about like how companies like Microsoft are sponsoring and integrating AI "tools" that generate images, video, and music for literally no good reason. And they were pissed that the Internet is becoming increasingly unusable aka enshittified. So they want to do something about that. Or die trying.

Her first album, HELLO WORLD, is an exercise in practice and imperfection. It's named after the program you write when you're learning a new computer language and she thinks that's kinda cool. She wrote, recorded, and produced the entire thing, by herself, in 3 weeks, just to like try out this whole releasing music thing. As she's writing this now, in third person for some reason, she has no idea if the album will find any success. But like, it was done in 3 weeks, so she's not really bothered either way. Frankly, she just wants to inspire like at least one person to make something and put it out there, on the Internet, because independent art is fucking awesome, and art on the Internet connects people who live in shitty lonely towns. And if that independent art is imperfect, that's even better, because AI can't make imperfect art. So go do your art thing, autistic human. ROSEWATER believes in you.