Mara Vance

Mara writes the first line of every Echora song on a battered Juno-60 that has been through four floods and two van breakdowns. Her voice is the band’s centre of gravity: low, unhurried, and always recorded in one take before the coffee goes cold.

Raised between Savannah and Queens, she spent her twenties singing in church balconies and basement noise rooms — an education you can still hear in the way Nightform swings between hymn and static. She produced the record’s second half herself, tracking vocals through a spring reverb pulled out of a broken organ.

On stage she runs her own modular chain, so no two nights of “Low Country” ever land the same way. “A song should be a little unfinished,” she says. “That’s the part the room gets to write.”