A sonic exploration of Intimacy, Boundaries, and Borders

Vancouver New Music’s annual festival returns this year with Whispered Folds, October 16-18, 2025, at the ANNEX. 

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.

Purchase your festival pass here.

Day 1:

Émilie Payeur (Montreal)

In Between

Émilie Payeur’s In Between explores the fluid borders between the self and the collective, between vulnerability and connection, inviting listeners into a shared liminal space. Drawing from Payeur’s research and exploration of the Balinese Calonarang ritual through a psychoanalytic lens, In Between explores how notions of the sacred, the symbolic, and transcendence can be embodied through sound, objects and actions. This work challenges the expected forms of sound performance, blending media and dissolving conventional frameworks, while representing a personal journey, confronting self-imposed limits and welcoming imperfection and rawness.

Parmela Attariwala (Vancouver)

Parmela Attariwala will present works that endeavour to hybridize conflicting metaphors from her artistic and ethnocultural worlds—united by a focus on end of life. Her performance will begin and close with two fully-embodied works choreographed by bharata-natyam artists Sujit Vaidya and Gitanjali Kolanad respectively. These works will frame unworded settings of poems from the Sikh night-time prayer (which is also recited at death), and an improvisation with a departed friend.

Cecilia Lopez (Argentina/US)

RED

RED is a large-scale speaker-wire handwoven electronic instrument created by Cecilia Lopez that investigates interactions with unstable acoustic feedback systems. The piece works as a cluster of sonic feedback that is sensitive to its surroundings, where the sounds and movements in the space affect and shape the sonic result. This kind of exploration invites performers and audiences into the space where they both affect and are affected by the sound phenomena. Sound is modulated by “presence” and “touch” and occupies the space as acoustic architecture, while the interaction between the performer and the instrument is approached as a dialogue where listening and playing are explored simultaneously shaping the musical discourse of the piece.

Banner Credits: Émilie Payeur by Dylan Paquet