contemporary vocalist, double bassist, guitarist, composer & music teacher
melbourne, australia / znojmo, czech republic
2021 Music Victoria Awards Nominee: Best Folk Act
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★★★★ - The Age / Sydney Morning Herald
★★★★ - All About Jazz
Poetic, inventive and uniquely personal, Erica Bramham sidesteps traditional genre boundaries to produce a blend of folk, jazz and classical art music that is entirely her own.
Centred around the chamber sounds of voice, double bass, acoustic guitar, piano and mandolin, with well-chosen moments of digital processing and contemporary production, her songs are poignant and detailed, drawing from her training in both classical and contemporary improvised music. Her work showcases a lyrical finesse, musical creativity and flair for surrealism that spreads to her arrangements, which move with a deft confidence between moments of song, textural soundscapes and improvisation.
In 2021 Erica was nominated as Best Folk Artist in the Music Victoria Awards and a recipient of the Sustaining Creative Workers Grant from Regional Arts Victoria.
“Bramham and her band have made a fine record of forward looking modern vocal jazz that shows a way to make interesting, lyrically inventive improvised music—let’s just hope that the world is listening.”
In 2021 Bramham released Enamel, featuring songs written during Melbourne’s long 2020 COVID-19 lockdown. The album captures the isolation and cabin fever of the past year, with field recordings, percussion from various kitchen and household items, and a broken piano appearing alongside Bramham’s voice, double bass, guitar and mandolin. Enamel was released to four-star reviews in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, with critic Jessie Cunnife highlighting the album’s “elegant imagery ... [which] is delivered with a confidence that convinces us the artist knows exactly what she’s doing”.
Enamel follows Twelve Moons (2016) and Songs From A Midnight Room (2018). Both albums were released to four star reviews, with Twelve Moons named alongside David Bowie and Vijay Iyer as one of the top ten releases of 2016 on All About Jazz by British music critic Phil Barnes.
“Working in a musical world where a fine mist obscures any lines between jazz, folk, improvisation and rock, [Bramham] writes songs that often feel like settings for poetry rather than lyrics”
In January 2017 Erica embarked on The Song-Chain Project, an ambitious creative mission to compose, record and share a new piece of music every day for 365 days. The project produced an impressive 180 songs, soundscapes, free improvisations, musical poems, nonsense, noise and other pieces of musical art, which, combined with the accompanying writing and video performances, stand as a complex and fascinating journal of a year in the life of an artist.
“A daring songstress who takes no prisoners, as she sets to explore the (sometimes daunting, always confronting) nature of songwriting itself, completely baring her soul, flesh and bones in the process. ”
Erica also arranges music for the collaborative project In Our Own Words alongside pianist Nathan Liow, bassist Adam Spiegl, and drummer Justin Olsson. The project has produced three shows to date, featuring new arrangements of Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Tom Waits’ music, each of which opened to sell-out audiences at their Melbourne premieres. She has also collaborated with the contemporary opera collective BegOpCoOp, contributing libretto for the production Seduction And Demise In East Berlin (2013) and writing and performing spoken word pieces with live effects processing for Songs Of The Sea (2017).
Alongside her performance career Erica is a passionate music educator, tutoring students privately in voice, guitar, ukulele, music theory and songwriting. She is also Director of Bright Young Music, a boutique wedding and corporate entertainment agency based in Melbourne.
Erica holds a Bachelor of Music with Honours from Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts. She has studied under Gian Slater, Nilusha Dassenaike and Michelle Nicolle (jazz and improvised voice), Anita Hustas (classical and improvised double bass) and Alistair McClean (contemporary and improvised guitar).
