The Ambience of Bianca Espino: Discovering Her Own Voice

Before Bianca Espino revealed herself as an artist to the public eye, she had a living room full of instruments that had no business being there.

Her dad immigrated from the Philippines to Canada with little to his name. When he landed on new soil, the first thing he purchased was not an apartment – it was a guitar and a piano. Not long after that, a church he frequently attended was throwing out their drum kit. He pulled it from the dumpster and hauled it back as a welcomed addition to his collection of instruments. 

For families that immigrate to new places, especially Filipino families, a long-term plan is something more concrete, something that justifies the distance traveled and the things left behind. In this household, the instruments came first. They always came first. Bianca grew up watching him play all of it, until one day she stopped watching and started asking if she could try. He let her and from that point on, she never really stopped.

The first song Bianca played for her dad was called “Invisible Girl.” She was anxiously impatient at her Lola’s house after school, waiting for her dad to walk through the front door. When the door finally opened, she immediately ran up to him, begging him to listen. When she finished playing the song, he showed a soft smile and provided a simple two words: good job.

“He’s always been a perfectionist, still is, and is kind of a hard person to impress,” Bianca says. “It was more of an as-you-should-be-doing-something-musical type of response.”

It’s a level of encouragement dressed as expectation. She likes to think it’s better that way.

Bianca is 21, creating songs from her journal entries while studying English Language and Literature at the University of Toronto. When something happens in her life, she writes a song about it. When emotions become too heavy to carry, they become a melody. Songs appear as they arrive in instances like a breakup, an overheard conversation, or a friend’s experience she can’t stop thinking about. 

“I never go about life in hopes to find inspiration,” she says. “It kind of comes as it does, sometimes at the wrong time.”

In the summer of 2023, Bianca attended Berklee’s five-week program in Boston where she met producer Ian Marc after discovering that they were the only Canadians in a room full of people from “more than 70 countries.” They lived within only an hour of each other back home so after the program wrapped up, Ian invited her to visit his home studio. That was the beginning of the creative partnership that has defined every song under the name Bianca Espino.

“None of our sessions are ever set with a let’s-finish-it-today mindset,” Bianca says. “It’s a lot of feeling and experimentation on our end to see what clicks.”

In today’s music industry, the prioritization of short-term gratification has forced most artists at Bianca’s level to operate inside this logic. Sessions built around finishing something today so it can go up tomorrow, releases timed to algorithm cycles, tracks engineered to survive a skip, all of this has reduced the process of creation into something more structural than personal.

Bianca and Ian work differently with the belief that music loses something essential when the timeline is wrong and songs can get lost in translation if the process is rushed. Bianca’s sound is “ever-evolving” to become more individualistic as the world around her becomes wider. She’s reading more, listening to other artists, and consuming different types of media to expand what she can reach for.

This isn’t a rejection of ambition. It’s a rejection of the standard that music has to arrive before she’s ready to make it. In class, Bianca has been studying the texts “Beowulf” and “Gawain and the Green Knight,” old English literature that has survived centuries because it was created to withstand the test of time. The permanence of quality has seeped into her writing as Bianca continues to learn. Her influences – Lizzy McAlpine, Mk.gee, Dijon, Niki – are always present, always trickling through, but Bianca keeps her writing authentic and straight out of her own feelings.

“What makes it something you’re in conversation with is your own creative process,” she says. “None of us have the exact same routine.”

That routine – the patience, the acceptance of vulnerability, the refusal to be anybody but herself – that’s where the sound lives.

Bianca’s latest single, “Ego Collecting,” began with a photograph of seashells sitting in her camera roll from a day at the beach. Something about it connected to a thought she had about how people move through the world like collectors, obtaining closeness for their own benefit while giving nothing back. It was written with one specific person in mind before she realized it could extend just as easily to certain friendships.

Bianca says the six month process of making the track included “her and Ian in a room for 10 hours a day with only pho.” During recording, she and Ian experimented with leaving outside noises present in the background. With the stove running, glasses clinking, and the air conditioning humming through the takes, everything was designed to represent the mindset of ego and “how it’s hard to hear yourself when the other person is overshadowing.” The imperfections aren’t texture. They’re the point.

She describes “Ego Collecting” as probably her easiest song to play. It’s an open D, the same chord shape cycling through open, first fret, fifth fret, and back again the entire way through. Her guitar never complicates itself because everything the song carries emotionally lives in her voice and her words alone.

Her favorite lyric describes a face turning green and blue, resembling the colors of iMessage bubbles, visible on someone’s face when they’re staring at their phone instead of listening to you. It arrived through “a stream of consciousness prior to writing a song,” landing before she fully understood why.

The most impactful words in the song though lie in its hook. Her body is in the water. She’s scared he won’t pull her out. For most of the song that fear stays present and unresolved. Then in the final chorus, one word changes. Scared becomes know. The melody doesn’t shift. It lands quietly, the way a door closes when someone has finally decided to stop leaving it open.

“I just think for myself, I’m writing from a place of truth,” Bianca says. “I’d like to think that my lyrics have evolved in specificity over time, but they have always been intentional from the start.” 

Her music doesn’t chase perfection. It preserves the moment as it actually feels. The focus of Bianca’s artistry right now is making space for the right sound, the right moment, the right version of herself to step into. 

The cluster of instruments from her childhood apartment, the flame on the stove still burning, the glasses clinking, the AC running, most artists would’ve cleaned that space up. Bianca left it there and called it what it was. 

That’s the ambience.