by Grady Mitchell | “Music is just…it’s something else,” says Vancouver’s Hannah Epperson. “It’s all of the spaces in between language that we can’t quite touch.” The youngest child in a musical family, Hannah first grabbed a violin at five. With the exception of a break in her teens (inspired, she says, by hormones), she’s played ever since.

If you’ve wondered how a one-woman act can achieve such grand sound, it’s through a technique called looping. She calls the style “live orchestration. You can record in real time a phrase of music, and then have it play back over and over again.” Using her loop pedal she layers those phrases one atop another to slowly build a cascade of sound.

She developed the style on a spontaneous trip to Berlin in pursuit of a guy (“not something I’d recommend,” she advises). Once her money quickly disappeared, she started busking under bridges, hauling a loop pedal around in lieu of a backing band. Often her songs begin by plucking a melody, then layering in sweeping string lines along with her soft, breathy voice.

That combo brought her to 2013’s Peak Performance Project, where she placed second. The experience was scary, she says, but powerful, especially since it’s just her up on stage. “You can build a tsunami wave of sound, which is really exhilarating, and can go horribly wrong really fast.”

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While she has complete control over her music, she says, there’s added pressure being a solo artist. She counteracts that pressure by turning inward during performances. “When I play my own music I get completely lost. I close my eyes and I feel like I’m in a cocoon. The end of a song is always this jarring return.”

Recently she’s been working on an album with producer Ajay Bhattacharyya of Data Romance. During the recording process she’s moved away from the violin foundations of her previous work. There’s a greater focus on lyrics, she says, “it’s dancey…some of it’s kind of sexy.” With her earlier work she’d find a riff on the loop pedal and hammer out a song quickly. Now songs are taking longer to come together. There’s been more premeditation, even studying, she says. “Constantly being engaged in things that are not what you’re interested in. You end up re-metabolizing those things. The more you expose yourself to, the more opportunity there is for your synapses to fire…”

The album should be out in spring of next year. Until then, you can hear more at her Soundcloud.

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