Local Sirens - Women's Audio Mission

Local Sirens: Women in Music Performance Series is a free, all-ages quarterly performance series that features exceptional Bay Area women and gender-expansive musicians and performers. Local Sirens supports artists who are creating new and innovative work that is representative of the diverse communities of the Bay Area. To date, Local Sirens has presented the work of 75+ local women and gender-expansive artists and reached over 7,500 attendees at venues including The Rickshaw Stop, PianoFight, The New Parish, and more.

The goal of WAM’s Local Sirens series is to address the chronic gender and racial inequity in the music industry by promoting and presenting female and gender-expansive BIPOC artists and supporting them with paid commissions to create new work and artist recording residencies in WAM’s professional studios. Only 2-3% of music producers and 12% of songwriters are women/gender-expansive, and far fewer are BIPOC.

Artist Recording Residencies: provide local BIPOC women and gender-expansive artists with free recording services and mentoring. Recording Residencies include an artist stipend and 1-2 weeks of recording studio time in WAM’s studios in San Francisco with a WAM engineer. The residency culminates in a live performance at one of WAM’s Local Sirens Concerts.

After completing WAM Local Sirens residencies and performances, artists have:

appeared on/in Billboard, Good Morning America, ESPN, NPR
signed record deals: Hollywood, Disney, Innova, Father/Daughter
produced albums ranked Top 10 on NPR Alt.Latino
performed at Carnegie Hall, NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts, YBCA

WAM’s world-class recording studio and training facility is the only professional recording studio in the world specifically built and run entirely by women and gender-expansive staff.

WAM’s unique studio is home to a rigorous internship and training environment that cultivates female and gender-expansive recording engineers and producers and provides a low-cost, high-quality recording environment for independent artists. WAM has had the pleasure of working on many award-winning projects such as GRAMMY winner Kronos Quartet, a Grammy-winning album by Angelique Kidjo, an Academy Award-nominated soundtrack to the film “Dirty Wars,” and Vietnamese composer Van-Anh Vo, chosen as one of the 50 best albums of 2013 by NPR.

Apply for our Local Sirens Artist Recording Residency today!

Local Sirens: Women In Music Performance Series July 21st, 2022, featuring DJ Bitesize, STONI, and Skip the Needle, live at The Parks at 5M on Minna & Mary St. in San Francisco, CA.

Past Local Sirens performers include Skip The Needle, Stoni, DJ Bitesize, SIRI SEIKO, La Femme Papi, Samaria, Linda Sol, Hodari Blue, Chhoti Maa, The Onyx, Dioganhdih, B-Side Brujas, Rayana Jay, Rocky Rivera, Kah Liberation, Meklit, Meernaa, Tanukichan, The She’s, Lauren O’Connell, Diana Gameros, Fely Tchaco, Pamela Z, Camille Safiya, Xiomara, Chhoti Maa, SOAR, Versoul, Ruby Mountain, Meklit, Gina Madrid, Naima Shalhoub, Spellling, Pllush, Azuah, Lalin St. Juste, Rose Droll, Humid, Kohinoorgasm, Ötzi, HiScores, Ver Soul, Carly Bond, Madeline Kenney, Mariachi Feminil Orgullo Mexicano, Antique Naked Soul, Built For The Sea, Silver Shadows, Try the Pie, Mane, Sirena Victima, and DJ Mashi Mashi.

Local Sirens Artists

Check out the playback of our 2021 Local Sirens: Women in Music Concert Series live at Bandcamp!

This lineup included Lalin St. Juste (The Seshen), who headlined the event. Lalin is the lead singer of The Seshen, who performed as a solo act, debuting her independent and unique sound featured in her latest upcoming release, behind my eyes. Native emcee, performer, and author Rocky Rivera followed Kah Liberation with songs from her latest album Rocky’s Revenge. The noir, female ensemble Kah Liberation, opened the show offering doses of sound bathing, soul healing & liberation along the way.

Press Releases

Local Sirens is made possible through support from California Arts Council, San Francisco Arts Commission, Fleishhacker Foundation, Zellerbach Family Foundation, Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, and Grants for the Arts.

The Artist Residency program provides support for San Francisco Bay Area-based women/gender-expansive artists that identify as Black, Indigenous, or Artists of Color.

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