Erica Bramham is a critically acclaimed vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and composer from Melbourne, Australia. Poetic, inventive and uniquely personal, her work crosses the boundaries between jazz, folk and experimental art music, showcasing her finesse as a lyricist and a captivating performance style that blends song with spoken word and extended vocal technique.
“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.”
Bramham has recorded two albums to date, 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 jazz critic Phil Barnes. Her music has been featured on ABC Radio National, ABC Jazz, PBS, 3RRR and various international community radio stations.
“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.
Since completing The Song-Chain Project Bramham has continued her explorations into creativity beyond the project, addressing the topic through freelance writing and her podcast Mind Over Myth.
“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).
In addition to her performance career, Erica is Director of Bright Young Music, a boutique wedding and corporate entertainment agency based in Melbourne. She is also a passionate teacher, tutoring students privately in voice, guitar, ukulele, music theory and songwriting.
Erica holds a Bachelor of Music (Honours) from Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts, where she majored in improvised voice. In 2018 she took up double bass, and is currently studying under Anita Hustas, with a view to writing and performing new works for voice and bass in 2019.