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 2:

JJJJJerome Ellis (US) 

JJJJJerome Ellis is a stuttering, Afro-Caribbean composer, poet, and performer. His works are invitations to healing, transcendence, communion, and deep listening. Through an interdisciplinary practice that focuses on oral storytelling, improvisation, and the interrelations between speech, silence, disability, and religion, he’s collaborated with choreographers, rappers, playwrights, booksellers, typographers, podcasters, toddlers, and filmmakers.

Ellis will share improvisations and atmospheres from his new record Vesper Sparrow, released by Shelter Press.

Anaïs Maviel (US)

Anaïs Maviel is a composer, artist, vocalist & multi-instrumentalist dedicated to translating spiritual concepts to sensory experiences, using sound as medicine & alchemy. With traditional and experimental approaches, her works investigate the power of sound to shape reality, and emphasize the relevance of cultural hybridity. She navigates song, choral, instrumental, orchestral music, and staging with a strong connection to cosmologies of sound and speech rooted in oral traditions such as mantra and ring shout. She strives to bridge the gaps between genres and to create a diverse, inclusive, yet sacred musical experience.

Maviel will perform a series of originals excerpted from her various works, including Time is Due, and arrangements of folkloric songs. Maviel’s compositional language focuses on harmony and, in a solo performance context, the piano allows her to share her latest explorations, applied to song forms, and as they support storytelling, lyricism and improvisation.

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Notice:

• We’re happy to provide ASL interpretation for JJJJJerome Ellis' performance and artist talk. 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.

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Banner Credits: JJJJJerome Ellis by Cameron Kelly Mcleod