We were lucky to catch up with Karine Bruce-Doe, Mason Van Gieson, Denise Nalibotsky recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Karine Bruce-Doe, Mason Van Gieson, Denise Nalibotsky thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Do you feel you or your work has ever been misunderstood or mischaracterized? If so, tell us the story and how/why it happened and if there are any interesting learnings or insights you took from the experience?
A barrier that we, and many female artists before us, have been working hard to break is the stereotyping that surrounds being an all-woman group in a predominantly male space. While our peers in our local community have been nothing but supportive, it can be challenging to debunk stereotypes about women’s vocal capacity in the wider vocal music space. There’s a pervasive idea that vocal groups need men in order to have a “full” sound and hard-hitting beatbox, or that women will prioritize family or domestic life over the demands of a tough industry (and therefore aren’t “serious” musicians, or worth investing in).
The history of vocal harmony music reflects this bias—when you think of barbershop, you automatically think of all-male quartets. If you were to do a Google search for the phrase “a cappella group” right now, some variation of Take 6, Boyz II Men, Straight No Chaser, Home Free or Pentatonix would likely show up as your top results. In all of those groups, there is a total of one woman, Kirstie Maldonado of Pentatonix. Even in the wider professional a cappella circuit, the gender gap in the number of working professionals making a living from a cappella music is stark.
While music, and especially singing, is often marketed toward girls as an extracurricular activity in scholastic settings, the gender dynamic is flipped in the professional world. This imbalance has both micro and macro effects for women in the industry. It can result in us showing up to sound checks at venues that don’t know how to mix a group with our configuration, attempts to market us in ways that don’t match the music we produce, or audiences approaching our shows with expectations that our sound will be “smaller”. From a macro perspective, this bias results in real jobs, real wages, that women simply aren’t receiving.
We work to combat these stereotypes at every show we do, and to carve out a space in the professional world for our sisters in the present and the future. We decouple gender identity and our understanding of vocal value. Our group features women across a huge cross-section of different musical backgrounds, voice types and skill sets, and we meet each individual where they’re at, and create a sound that highlights this diversity of skill. Our commitment to uplifting our members for who they are is something we’re really proud of. We also don’t utilize male-centric metrics to measure our value, we just work with the skills we have and the sound we want. Versatile vocal ranges, creative, healthy singing techniques and the power of technology allow us to innovate, creating a sound that feels reflective of the individuals in the group. And the women around us are doing this too! There are so many amazing women in the a cappella community who are owning their space, working collaboratively, and reaching out a hand to the next generation of women and girls. In the years and decades to come, we hope we can make a lasting impact and inspire the women after us to keep pushing boundaries and thinking outside of the box.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Taking a little step back, let’s chat more about what we do from a bird’s eye view. A cappella—styled with a space, two Ps and two Ls—refers to music performed without any non-vocal instruments. A cappella groups tend to be smaller in size than a choir (3-12 members is standard), but the term only refers to all-vocal music, it doesn’t refer to genre. Everything from barbershop to vocal jazz to madrigals can be considered a cappella music.
VICE A Cappella is an all-woman a cappella group based in New York City with an emphasis on a contemporary pop sound. We feature an agile upper vocal trio and a world-class rhythm section comprised of a bass and vocal percussionist (our VP happens to be an award-winning beatboxer, too, but that’s just icing on the cake). While the group’s structure has evolved since our founding in 2019 into a collective—allowing us to introduce new talent and explore new opportunities—we’ve stayed true to our core performance dynamic of 5 powerful voices. We love reintroducing audiences to songs they might already know through new musical lenses; we are thoughtful in our reinterpretations of classics, and strive to have audiences coming out of our shows look at new facets of the stories found in music they love. In addition to our innovative arranging style, we’re hoping to add original music to the mix in the coming years.
Another interesting thing to know about VICE is our backgrounds in music and entertainment. Some of us studied and currently work in the entertainment space, ranging from composition and education, to performance and music business. Other members work outside of music – we have social workers, public school teachers, visual artists, data scientists, and more! – but they cultivate their creative passions and skill sets through the collaborations VICE offers. We take pride in fostering an environment through which dynamic vocal musicians can come together to experiment, exchange ideas, and play. The result is music that reflects a creative vision that is uniquely “us”.
You can learn more about VICE at our website www.viceacappella.com, or by following along on social media @viceacappella. You can also catch our live performances in New York City, like our show at DROM on October 8, 2023 at 7 PM ET; we’ll be headlining with some really wonderful special guests.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
For us, learning to create collaboratively as a team has been the most rewarding aspect of the work we do. Our group is versatile, and consists of women who are all powerhouses in their own right with rich individual creative lives. Between us, the women of VICE represent CARA and ICCA award-winning arrangements and choreography, in-house audio and video production, and internationally-ranked competitive beatbox, but we have committed to blending our unique skillsets into a single ever-evolving, invigorating partnership. Despite having our areas of specialty, tapping into different parts of our brains and exercising different muscles can be incredibly satisfying, especially if a skill set sticks, and idea exchange with the ability to execute in real-time is invaluable.
The blend of interests can even be seen through the types of music we perform. Our repertoire ranges from Motown and neo-soul to electronic and top 40 hits, leaving room for us to reinterpret classic and contemporary songs by weaving in sultry R&B vocals with technical vocal percussion. Even something as simple as asking why a particular song or musician resonates with a member helps us understand each other, and ultimately, how our individual narratives lead to a beautiful and unique collection of stories.
Have you ever had to pivot?
Navigating the evolving live performance space mid and post-COVID pandemic has kept us on our toes over the past few years. Pre-pandemic, we were feeling mighty with momentum and hungry for community. We placed second at the Varsity Vocals Open Northeast Semifinal in New York, and earned an award for Outstanding Vocal Percussion. We were recording nonstop, and performing at events that offered us the opportunity to connect with talented artists and ensembles based in the Northeastern United States, many of whom we remain close to. Things seemed really straightforward.
In mid-March 2020 when the world was shutting down and many people turned inward, our initial instincts were to follow suit. It was a genuinely terrible time, and, in addition to the global collective trauma we were all undergoing, we had to face that all of the momentum we had built in the live entertainment arena had disappeared, just like that. We started singing in isolation, but realized we needed to find innovative ways to bring all of our voices together. We learned how to produce our own videos, how to build and manage a social media presence, and how to make the situation in front of us work for us. This new commitment led to many “quarantune” box videos and new arrangements that are still in our repertoire. Our singles “Rhiannon” and “Hey There Delilah,” which were produced entirely in-house, were also released on all streaming platforms later that year.
Over time, we started missing the feeling of camaraderie in the a cappella community and began looking for ways to safely connect with people again. Our solution: collaborative arrangements and video projects with other vocal bands based in the United States, and most exciting, with another fantastic all-woman vocal band based in the United Kingdom called VERSA (yes, we did call this collaboration VICE-VERSA). These collaborative experiments ended up being amazing opportunities to create community and perform together across huge geographic distance in ways we wouldn’t usually be able to in live performance.
We can’t emphasize enough the newfound confidence this time of change has brought us. If we hadn’t already been routinizing thinking outside the box, and embracing the serendipity fostered by our hard work, we may not have ever had the courage to pursue an expansion from a static 5-woman band to a collective membership model, but we discovered so much about our values during this time that it became a no-brainer for us to open our community to new singers. During this time, the three of us (Denise, Mason and Karine) also learned so much about our commitments and capabilities as leaders and friends to one another, which was truly special.
Since the resumption of live performances in 2021 and 2022, VICE’s latest venture has been cultivating community inside and outside our home base in New York City. We have had the pleasure of performing at spots like Green Room 42, The Bowery Electric, Parkside Lounge and many more venues in the city. We’ve been playing with livestreaming our shows and continuing to grow our social media presence, and have some really exciting educational endeavors upcoming. In terms of what the future holds, we cannot wait to continue to grow the VICE family and share our art with as many people as we can!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.viceacappella.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/viceacappella/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/viceacappella
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/viceacappella
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@viceacappella
- Other: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/viceacappella TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@viceacappella Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/16yLzqWvYE4OBbmjqCjGVM?si=ZMHl93fkSkC2rqnP85JcgQ&nd=1
Image Credits
Ian Shiff, Patience Ojionuka