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VNM Festival 2025
Whispered Folds: Day 2
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Notices:
We’re happy to provide ASL interpretation for this event. If you’d like to request it, please indicate it at the checkout, or reach out to info@newmusic.org. We need at least 14 days' notice to secure an interpreter.
QUIET PLEASE! As these performances are sound sensitive, please refrain from making noise. No children under 10 years permitted.
Whispered Folds is a metaphor for the overlapping layers of identity, experience, and resonances that are explored in this year’s VNM festival. Using sound as a powerful medium to reimagine relationships between individuals, cultures and spaces, the artists invite us to consider how sound reflects and disrupts physical, psychological, and cultural borders.
Sound artist Brady Marks will perform a live improvised mix of propulsive music, while narrating a list of personals posts reminiscent of "I Saw You" or "Missed Connection" personal column advertisements from the back of print newspapers like the Georgia Straight and Terminal City from Vancouver.
Historically, queer desire while often coded or marginalized in mainstream visual media (film & TV) thrives in acoustic first space (dark dance floors, underground live music venues). One exception was the "back pages" of local print media, a kind of low rent visual/print media space. This 3rd space of marginalized desire, was home to astrology, advice columns, sex worker and escort service ads, along with a staple of this corner of the media market, the "Missed Connection" posting. With the disappearance of print media this peripheral media landscape has been fragmented and displaced largely online. One app/platform called _Lex_ launched in 2019, which sought to recreate the look and feel of these "Missed Connection" columns particularly courting the queer dating market. In the artist's opinion the app has since lost this particular focus having now "jumped the shark". However during its heyday in the spring of 2022, the artist started collecting particularly evocative examples of these as an essay of queer desire or found poetry. These form the narrative thread of this performance, while the performed music evokes the darkened acoustic 1st spaces that continue to birth, hold and frame renewed versions of queer desire.
Content warning:
Brady Marks' project engages with mature themes. Sexual acts will be referred to and named, some explicit language used. However no explicit acts or nudity will be performed or presented directly.
Inspired by the problems and promises of music as a means of performing and enacting imaginaries of emotional repair, Erin Gee explores the boundaries of emotional authenticity, intimacy, and imagination in sound. Her works are a speculative ground for encountering emotion in an experimental fashion. Care is performed and informed through techniques inspired by electroacoustic music, ASMR, hypnosis, therapy, and pink-collar work.
In Bloom uses whispered first-person narration to conjure posthuman imaginaries through ecological entanglement, further amplified by an immersive video collaboration with Maxime Corbeil-Perron. During the performance, the listener will be guided through an afterlife simulation in which they are lovingly decomposed by bacteria and fungi, thus becoming part of forest ecology. Gee’s narration shifts between gentle instruction, uncanny transformation, and dark humor, inviting the listener to reflect on cycles of death, decay, and renewal grounded in acoustic rumbles, groans, electronic treatments, and extended range of her voice. An improvised ambient prologue opens the work, creating space where the human voice speaks from within the imagined materials of soil, fungus, and breath.
Content warning:
Erin Gee's performance offers a guided meditation on the afterlife, inviting listeners to imagine their own return to the earth through processes of decay and renewal. Those navigating grief or end-of-life experiences may find these themes tender or intense. The work also involves flickering lights.
In Animacy or A Breath Manifest, Vica Pacheco bridges the realms of animism, ritual, and technology through an evocative sound performance. Drawing inspiration from pre-Columbian Mesoamerican whistling vessels – ceramic instruments that produce sound using air and water – Pacheco has developed a series of hydraulic ceramic sculptures that serve as both sonic and sculptural works. These pieces explore themes of breath, organicity, and the interplay between ancient and contemporary technologies. The performance unfolds as an immersive sonic experience, where Pacheco utilizes her body and breath to animate these ceramic vessels, transforming them into an orchestra of voices that blur the line between human and non-human. Breath becomes a language for reimagining connections between the body, territory, and collective memory while the fusion of pre-Hispanic traditions with contemporary digital and electronic technologies generates shared, multisensory dialogue with history and ecology.
Brady Marks is a computational artist working primarily in audiovisual practices, new media and kinect art. Thematically her work engages critically with the fallibility and promise of technology, perspectives of place – virtual/actual, ecological and narratives of self orientation in the sciences.
Brady is concerned with how we live our lives in the face of technological encroachment; to that end, she experiments with media configurations that express a middle way between technological fetishism and dystopian fantasies. Along this way she takes her audiences behind the curtain, provides tools for technological play, educates and explores hypothetical new relationships for us with our tech. This is what she means when she calls herself a Cultural Prototyper.
She obtained an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and a Masters in Interactive Arts from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. As a graduate of Simon Fraser University taught by faculty including original members of the World Soundscape Project (WSP), and as a member of the Soundscape Collective at Vancouver Co-operative Radio, Brady Marks is an inheritor of the WSP legacy of Acoustic Ecology. She is a frequent host of Soundscape on Co-op Radio, member of the Vancouver Electronic Ensemble, curator of the Coda series of live coding events and DJs Queer Dance Music.
Vancouver is situated on unceded, traditional and ancestral xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territories.
Erin Gee (TIO’TIA:KE – Montreal) is a multidisciplinary artist and assistant professor in the Faculty of Music at Université de Montréal. Her expanded vision of music explores the body as an instrument, using sonic information—often derived from biofeedback—to compose physiological and emotional experiences. Grounded in feminist and queer thought, Gee blends DIY affective technologies with vocal techniques inspired by ASMR, clinical psychology, and hypnotism to create music that directly operates on the listener's consciousness through imagination. She conceptualizes the body as wetware, a vital counterpart to hardware and software in electronic music. Her creative practice spans neural networks, virtual reality, robotics, and biofeedback systems, often in collaboration with choirs and ensembles. She has recently explored quantum teleportation and the transmission of emotion through sound as a subject in Affect Transfer (2024) commissioned by ensemble SuperMusique (Montreal). Gee’s work has been featured at international venues including Ars Electronica (AT), MUTEK (AR/ES/CA), Toronto Biennale (CA), Karachi Biennale (PK), and NRW Forum (DE).
Vica Pacheco is a Oaxacan-born, Brussels-based artist. Her multidisciplinary practice spans experimental music, composition, ceramics, and 3D animation. Her work, often described as eclectic and energetic, explores mythological crossbreeding and interactions between human and non-human. She employs a syncretic approach, blending pre-Hispanic, archaic, and contemporary technologies with heterogeneous elements to create immersive sound performances and installations. She studied at La Esmeralda in Mexico City before graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Villa Arson in France in 2017. Her work has been featured in numerous international festivals, galleries, and institutions.
