5 Questions with AVAWAVES
5 Questions with AVAWAVES
AVAWAVES strip music down to its essential tension, the space between composition and impulse. The duo, comprised of violinist Anna Phoebe and pianist Aisling Brouwer, have spent a decade building a sound that operates in the gaps between modern classical and cinematic ambient.
Their day jobs scoring film and TV (The Buccaneers, among others) taught them how to construct atmosphere. But AVAWAVES is where they deconstruct it, following instinct over brief, and leaving plenty of room for the unexpected. Heartbeats, mixed by TJ Allen (Bat for Lashes, Portishead), marks a deliberate pivot. Gone are the reverb-heavy textures of earlier releases. What remains is spacious, emotionally direct and deliberately imperfect.
The duo’s process centres on deep listening to each other and to what the music demands. That sensitivity has become their signature, knowing when to step back and when to let the feeling fill the silence.
What does vulnerability sound like to you, and how do you know when you've captured it?
Anna: When something is slightly raw or unfinished, sometimes the first takes or not overly conscious performances have a vulnerability to them, because they come from an intuition and a feeling rather than “performing the notes”. In a technical sense, production can either mask or enhance vulnerability - my personal comfort zone, and within the AVAWAVES sound - has been traditionally to use a lot of reverb with long delays nd modulation to “sink” the strings into the tracks - it can help give that expansive cinematic sound. But for the first time ever we had someone else mix our album, TJ Allen, and he stripped it right back. It’s like seeing/hearing yourself with no filter. There’s a sonic honesty and vulnerability in that which is quite confronting. When you can be honest with yourself about who you are, and ok with letting the outside world see and hear that.
Aisling: Vulnerability to me means embracing imperfections, not smoothing over natural inflexions in the performance and having human touch and intuition guide the creative process.
A lot of the time, when everything is quantised and in a perfect straight repetitive format, it doesn't make you feel anything emotionally, and it's the deviation from that norm that captures the attention.
The music needs to feel raw and honest, and finding the right way to communicate that can be a process. Sometimes it's finding the right tone in a performance, other times it's about finding an edge to a certain sound or instrument in the production, but the aim is to stir something emotional every time you listen back to it.
Between instinct and improvisation, how do you know when a piece is finished?
Aisling: Ooph, that's a tough one. I struggle to define anything as “finished”, and the beauty of it being a collaboration is that we have two sets of ears on it.
Often times we will start a piece in the same room together as an improvisation or jam, and then we'll do individual rounds on it bouncing the ideas back and forth between us. This way you're always hearing it with fresh ears and avoid diving into rabbit holes in the studio where you take it too far in one direction and steer it away from the soul of the piece.
We'll often set our own deadlines for tracks, and it's more about knowing when to step away and let go of an arrangement, rather than reaching a state of completion.
Anna: There’s no exact point - but usually, when we start overworking it, we know we’ve gone too far. There are quite a few pieces like Nightdrive and Raindrop, where the violin and viola lines are from the first improvised take. It’s about setting yourself an intention and giving yourself parameters, and then responding to that instinctively. With AVAWAVES, there is a certain AVAWAVES sound or filter, which sets the overall tone. And Aisling and I have been playing, writing and recording music together now for almost 10 years, so instinctively we know where we’re going to go when we sit and improvise together at the start of the writing process. And then it’s usually about either playing with structure, adding production, choosing textures and layers. We’re both so in tune with each other, and the AVAWAVES sound, I can genuinely say we never have disagreed about the “endpoint” of a track. We just know - I think when you’ve been working with someone so long, you are already hearing it through their ears and filters - so I can sort of predict how Aisling will respond. And if she pushes back on an idea, I never really dispute it - and vice versa - we always leave space for the other person to try out an idea - and at the same time, we’re straightforward with how we feel. I guess it’s a very weird balance of total fluidity but also complete honesty.
“Scoring is such a great way to experiment with sound.”
How has your experience in scoring changed the way you approach an AVAWAVES record?
Anna: Scoring is such a great way to experiment with sound, and because you are serving someone else’s narrative, then the artist ego doesn’t really get in the room - this means you can make choices that maybe you wouldn’t necessarily make in your own artist realm of writing a record. I think the relationship is really symbiotic, and they feed into each other. Diving into the scoring world like for The Buccaneers is such an intense 8-month journey where you immerse yourself in a total alternate reality. And everything you do is done to serve that narrative and be part of a team of LOTS of voices giving feedback. The pace of writing can be extremely fast, so you’re really depending on those years of writing experience, trusting your intuition and making fast choices. It’s a very public expression of music within a team of people, and everything is up for critique.
After an intense period like that, coming back to writing an artist album can be suddenly very quiet!! Just Aisling and myself in a room with no narrative to support and no sounding boards or opinions - it’s a totally 180 degree shift. It’s nice to have the balance of both - I think scoring makes our artist world feel very intimate - and our artist world means we come to a project with a cohesive tone and voice as a starting point - but we’re also able to leave that artist ego at the door and just serve the project. And the scoring world means that when it comes to the production, we can operate on a divide and conquer basis - we have such a well-oiled workflow in terms of our creative process. And that’s the same whether it’s for an artist project or a scoring project.
Aisling: If anything, I think it's enabled us to trust our instincts more, because The Buccaneers is such an AVAWAVES sounding score, and they really encouraged us to lean into that, which we were very lucky with.
It definitely influenced our record in terms of how we use voice as an extra instrument, but in a way, we've always being scoring narratives from the start - whether for imaginary films or real tv it's always been a part of our sound.
Being a composer for film & tv preceded being an artist for me, so in many ways I think the cross-pollination of those world has been an essential part of what has become our AVAWAVES sound and consciously or subconsciously our individual projects & creative pursuits continue to influence the music we write together as a duo.
What does a “live AVAWAVES” space need to feel like?
Aisling: The live AVAWAVES space is all about synergy, catharsis, and connection. We like the setting to be quite dark and hazy, like being in a dream state, and the beauty of instrumental music is that each individual will have different associations with the songs that reflect their own personal stories, moods, and experiences. It's a world where they can let their imagination run wild and create a different narrative in their mind, to which our music is the soundtrack.
It's always very rewarding playing live because it's an opportunity to really connect through the music both with the audience but also with each other. You experience the music differently on stage than in a studio, and due to the fact that we are just two people it also means we have to strip the arrangements back to their emotional core and find ways of communicating this in a live setting that does it justice.
Anna: For me, the importance of live performance has never been greater. Artists can change the shape of a space - we can offer a human way of connecting, interacting, expressing, and channelling. We live in a world of great extremes - war, climate crisis, polarisation and extremism - the role of the artist is to reflect this, to challenge this and to connect people. We also live in a world where the role of the artist is dependent on but severely undervalued, and with the rise and threat of AI in music and a removal of that human interaction, so live music is a space where we can remind ourselves what it is to be human.
What does it mean to you, right now, to be a composer?
Anna: Writing music is a way to connect, to tell stories that need to be told, to facilitate emotion and connection to human experiences - music can enhance the feeling of being human. I think big tech companies are endangering that connection - by data mining artistic endeavours without consent - by removing the HUMAN from music - you’ve asked about rawness and vulnerability - these are the essences of sentient beings - and they can be channelled and felt through music. Even if AI can recreate a perception of what this sounds like, it is NOT the same. The essence is missing; it is, by definition totally soulless. I don’t want my children to grow up in this tech world devoid of human creativity. SO, as composers we need to do our bit to fight for the rights of creators - that’s why I’m passionate about The Ivors Academy - an organisation with protects, empowers and celebrates the work of human songwriters and composers.
Aisling: Being a composer is essentially just a different way of translating emotions into music and communicating something that words can't quite touch on - it's a language in and of itself. Sometimes it's our own experiences we're drawing from, sometimes it's those of characters in a film or series - but all of it is part of creating a world where the music serves as a palette for expressing emotions or colours in the visual landscape.
I have been obsessed with film and TV soundtracks for as long as I can remember, and to get to do this for a living is beyond my wildest dreams, still to this day. What I love about being a composer for film & TV is that you are bringing something magical to life as part of a much larger creative team, where everyone has an obsessive passion for their speciality in the field. The attention to detail and individual expertise that goes into a project is mind-blowing and creates a whole far greater than the sum of its parts. There's no room for artistic egos to interfere with the grander vision, and it’s a true team effort. The cultural impact that well-made cinema, television & documentaries can have and how they hold up a mirror to society and pose questions to the world we live in is fascinating to me. The fact that we get to combine this with our AVAWAVES sound world and be a part of that too is so exciting.
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