LOOP-ZINE was able to catch up with the inspirational artist and founder about her journey.

Tiff, your story is so impressive and inspiring. Tell us a little about Mamas In Music. How important was it for you to start something like this? How has the reaction been from your peers?

After I had my baby I connected with a number of women in the music world who were experiencing a lot of similar types of challenges, and feeling isolated. And one of the people that I connected with was Mary [Leay]. We just started talking about the kind of support that was necessary and helpful for moms in the industry. We started to pull together an outline for a really powerful support and resource network for this particular demographic.

You see a lot of conversations happening around women’s issues and equality. We’re always experiencing the ups and downs, and facing lifelong challenges in the industry.

But then becoming a mother was a whole new level. From discrimination, to the psychology that we’re dealing within ourselves, to basic time management, and finding the resources needed to make it through, we found that there’s a gaping hole in the industry that struggles to support mothers through these changes.

We started Mamas In Music in a small fashion by connecting with moms and our peers who could help get the word out. The response from industry professionals, fans, friends, and fellow mothers has been really beautiful. We all know that moms are really busy juggling a lot of things, and mobilizing a community like this is not the easiest thing to do. But we’ve focused on keeping an open space.

Mary and I have been telling ourselves to take it one day at a time. We take steady and slow steps to open up opportunities little by little. People have been coming into the fold. We’ve had really powerful meetings with organizations and fellow moms.

We had a really amazing call with Mom Film Fest, and spoke with them about how they are also experiencing many of the things we experience in the film community. These opportunities to connect our communities and create cross collaboration relationships is really exciting. We’re also excited to be working on a writer’s camp in the UK at the beginning of the new year.

For all the mothers out there wanting to kickstart their career in music, or are in the middle of trying to make being a mother work on top of being a musician, what advice would you give them as far as trying to balance it out?

I really hope that with an organization like Mamas In Music, and what we hope to bring forward in the industry in the future, will help make finding this balance a lot more possible.

For those who want to find that balance between their careers and motherhood, there’s so much to say about taking things slow. I have always tried to be five steps ahead while doing 20 things at once. For me, this habit that I’ve had for my whole life was consistently being challenged during motherhood. I hit a limit and realized I can’t do everything at once. Understanding that helped me be able to focus my energy on one task at a time.

That’s one of the biggest things I would say to mothers. Be graceful with yourself, and be patient. It’s a great opportunity to renormal yourself. Take time to reevaluate. I think a lot of people also go through career changes without doing this. In my career I’ve shifted to being a choir director, singer songwriter, and to scoring after having my baby. A lot of changes happen after you give birth. And it’s really interesting to see what opportunities open up. If you can surrender to the magic of that and not roll past these opportunities, you will be surprised with what you find.

I was literally on my way to the hospital while finalizing the video for “X GIRL” off Archetype. I was on the road on the highway calling and saying I need the final version. We were releasing it in two months, and I was literally on my way to the hospital to have the baby.

And then I had the baby, and my management team dropped out, everything else happened and I had to hit pause. This time was crucial for me to renormal myself and understand my goals and future plans. Everything we have in our minds is our agenda, and that can be easily sideswiped. But we put it out, and we did it, right. That pause was important to understand how to move forward.

Does your moniker IAMEVE represent an alter-ego? Or is your on-stage persona the same as your everyday self?

I don’t really consider it to be my alter ego per se. It’s something that began surfacing in my consciousness. Or an extension of my consciousness.

I started IAMEVE years ago after a pretty life-altering accident. After that accident I was recovering physically for quite a long time. The nature of the injury forced me to be bedridden for many many months. During recovery I had a big shift in my perception of time, and had to surrender a lot of spiritual stuff.

A lot of things changed for me, including the way I was making and producing music .I was doing a much more organic kind of live performance and writing. And I’ve always really loved producing and developing soundscapes and ethereal experiences.

I have also always been a very visual artist as well. As a person very focused on my own personal spiritual development, this accident shifted all of my musical creativity. But it also opened up an opportunity for me to really dive deep into myself. And I began unraveling my own spiritual archetypes, and learning who I was through this whole journey and since this accident happened. It’s been a continuous unfolding of my inner self.

In this journey I realized that I spent a lot of my life not knowing what it was to be true to myself. Which is really sad. As most people know, you’re not alone. This is why Mama’s In Music is important to me because society is so patriarchal. The pressures that are on women don’t stop when you get to motherhood, even if society tells you you’re done. It’s painful and scary. IAMEVE allows me to unravel all of these archetypes while being true to myself.

Discovering IAMEVE and taking these moments to heal these layers across my life was a huge opening for me. The Voice of Eve is really how it shows up for me. I hear these voices and things just kind of appear. And I write them down and do my best to executive them.

With your new EP Archetype, you explore a couple different archetypes (the mother, the priestess, the explorer, the self-sabotage, the huntress, etc). How did you come up with this concept? What was the creation process like for the EP?

It was part of this whole process of me healing. IAMEVE as a project is a continuing exploration of these archetypes from day one. From the moment it was birthed until the end of the project, I think it will always be an exploration of these archetypes. It’s purpose is to go down the rabbit hole of humanity and find what our psyche does. Archetype is a continuation of that goal.

What’s your writing process like? How do you go about making a track?

That depends on the track and the project. I’ve started many songs just bare bones with a keyboard or guitar. I’ve even woken up in the middle of the night with lyrics pouring out to put them down on paper. I think my preference is to work with a combination of production tools I really like these days, especially my Eurorack modules. I love creating these sounds and the way they evoke different words and pictures in my mind. So I’m working from that direction a lot more lately.

I work mostly in Ableton, but also sometimes in Logic. I have a bunch of gear. Right now I’m pretty portable – I use a combination of analog gear in addition to MIDI software plugins. Right now for the most part I produce with my synthesizers or whatever tools I have going on here. Then I’ll have musicians come in and perform. I like to do a lot of editing and experimenting, and messing around with my plugins, on top of lots of vocal layering and sampling.

You’re truly doing it all! On top of your EP and foundation, you released a short film titled “Starman 360”. It’s such a unique project! What made you want to dive into something like this?

This was one of the early visions that popped into my mind as a need was coming to light. This idea of the different fragments of the self that split off. Our archetypes are like splits in our consciousness. The idea of healing and becoming fully connected with the self is to really collect those fragments and bring them home. To embrace all of them, the fragments that you love, the parts that you hate. The Starman piece was this overarching construct around the masculine and the feminine aspects of the self coming together and unifying.

As for the visuals of it, I was getting these downloads at the time, just pictures in my head, and I kept seeing these geometric landscapes made of body. And this idea came to me, that the feminine and masculine unifying would create this fabric of the soul and universe. That everything is unified, and made of the same material and fabric.

How would you describe and define your sound? Do you feel like you know what it is now or are you still keen to experiment?

I’m always experimenting. A new track that I’m releasing in January “Ocean Deep” is pretty different from everything on Archetype. But it still feels like it’s of the same fabric.

I’m doing a lot of experimenting right now. I don’t think that experimenting will ever stop, I would get bored otherwise.

I use a lot of ethereal sounds, but I also like to combine the ethereal with grit. I really like industrial sounding drums and mixing that with this spacey magical sound through complex layers. I’m actually working really hard right now to just simplify my approach.

I’ll put layers upon layers and will eventually have a track that’s just got 100 layers. It’s never ending. So now again, it’s interesting becoming a mother. Motherhood probably also shifted my approach to my sound. I’m trying to simplify and cut out some of the complexities, and I’m finding that this approach can still be beautiful. That’s something I’m certainly experimenting with right now.

What kind of experience would you like to create at future shows?

I love immersive performance. And the thing that excites me the most is combining immersive visuals and performance, and bringing the audience into the experience as well.

I used to throw these immersive parties in New York, and they were always themed. People would come to be part of the experience, and I think for me those parties were some of the most fulfilling performances I ever did.

What do you hope listeners take away from the Archetype EP?

I hope it just awakens people’s interest in discovering some of their own archetypes, and really understanding this concept of archetype within themselves. I think once we can recognize it, we can step out of it. Not being able to separate ourselves from it can lead to us getting lost in it. I think that if we are able to step back and be aware of the different archetypes in our daily lives, we give ourselves a lot more power.

What’s next for you?

In January we’re releasing a new track called “Ocean Deep,” and I’m really excited about how it came about. I was asked during the pandemic to do a live looping performance with a modular company called Noise Engineering. That instigated the writing of this piece. And of course I was in the thick of baby love, and had these amazing odules. I was getting musically lost in these really warm, deep sounds. I wrote that song for that live performance, and now we’re releasing it. Beyond that, I have a number of tracks that need to be finished and released hopefully at some point in 2022.

I’m also going in for my second elbow reconstruction in January. So I am very curious what kind of new unraveling of my mind will come with that as I work with recovery and a toddler.