About

VWAM was initially created at the Belvedere Court apartment building in response to the Vancouver housing crisis and as part of the activism against evictions in the Belvedere, which has been home to many artists and musicians over the years. In Spring 2018, residents and friends began meeting twice a month in the Belvedere to create ambient music as a fun and healing community activity, welcoming friends and neighbours. VWAM seeks to remedy the gender imbalance in music by providing an environment where women feel at ease to be creative within a male-dominated practice. It operates from a belief that everyone is musical, and that musical practice is a vital and essential to human experience. VWAM engages a community of active explorers in the science of music, sound, and evolving human consciousness. VWAM, with time, has now evolved into a core group of female musicians/artists, each in their own right, whom perform, create, and record experimental electronic/soundscape music together on a regular basis.

VWAM Amphibian Star on Bandcamp

https://vwam.bandcamp.com/album/amphibian-star

VWAM Les Fleurs du Mal

(2020 album released by Right Brain Records) https://www.rightbrainrecords.com/vwam

VWAM’s second release, Les Fleurs du Mal, was social-distance recorded during the Spring and Summer of Covid19. As Vancouver went into full shutdown, flowers began to stand out boldly in the midst of unfamiliar absences. A dark mood hung over the riot of their brilliance and among them lurked stingers, poisoners and mad stranglers with bewildering perfumes that lured susceptible admirers to their doom.

The tracks that make up this album were collaged together remotely from material collected through file-sharing and occasional duo recording sessions and feature feral vocals and hand-made percussion as well as VWAM’s usual synthesizers. Each track evolved over several months and is distinct yet complementary, a world unto itself, like the flowers.

VWAM Amphibian Star

(2018 album released by Right Brain Records) https://www.rightbrainrecords.com/vwam

The material for VWAM’s debut release album Amphibian Star flows from a structured improvisational concept motivated by the experience of “colour-hearing”: the aspect of synasthesia in which a person “sees” colours with the ear as part of a total musical experience. To date, VWAM’s live performances have continued the exploration of this concept, considering and combining elements such as drone, tonality and rhythm through sounds generated from a variety of analog and digital boutique synths, laptop and iPad soft synths, combined with VWAM’s ambient video projection. Since the release of Amphibian Star, VWAM’s lineup has expanded to include a classically trained vocalist with the concept of the human body as synthesizer. VWAM’s live performances are a powerful immersive sound driven by slow tempo beats designed to create a listening experience both intense and relaxed, stirring, meditative, and deeply grooving. The sound of VWAM is ever-evolving, always changing…..