ABOUT THE COMPOSER - JOOM PHAM
When Words Failed, Art Spoke
At eight years old, I arrived in America as a refugee from Vietnam, clutching memories he couldn't name in a language he didn't know. In Portland, I discovered Western classical music and American pop—soaring orchestras and infectious hooks that spoke directly to something wordless inside him. Unable to communicate verbally, he picked up a pencil. Drawing became my first English—a universal language that needed no translation.
Art saved me. It gave voice when I had none, a way to process what I'd left behind and imagine what could be ahead. In school notebooks I couldn't yet read, I drew his way into belonging—eventually winning a national prize in high school for a portrait of a US soldier in the Vietnam War.
The instinct to create never stopped. In the early 1990s, I spent five years in Brussels as an exhibiting fine artist, painting obsessively while absorbing European culture and holding tight to Vietnamese roots. There, I started his first piano composition as an untrained musician—beginning a three-decade journey of self-taught compositional exploration. He discovered the refugee experience isn't about losing one identity for another—it's about becoming the bridge between both.
Then came poetry—hundreds of poems over decades, painting with words instead of color. Those poems became the lyrical foundation for songwriting.
Terra Sol: Earth Meeting Sky
Terra Sol is where all my languages unite—visual, poetic, sonic. The project explores humanity's relationship with earth and sky through contemporary classical music that fuses acoustic orchestration with experimental vocals and cross-cultural traditions.
Foundation (2026), the first of a trilogy, is about building when you don't yet know what you're building for—immigrant labor, small hands under infinite sky proving sufficient for impossible work, the OM I learned as a Buddhist child in Vietnam transformed into Western chamber music that crosses thresholds into cosmic contact.
This is music born from necessity, refined by journey, and offered as gift—to those still building foundations in unfamiliar lands.
Two Mothers Entertainment
I named my label for my mother and my aunt Má Tư, who raised me in Vietnam before our family's departure. They taught me that creation is an act of love, and that every story we tell should honor those who came before while lighting the way for those who follow.
Through Two Mothers Entertainment, I create music for the in-between—sophisticated works for multicultural audiences navigating identity spaces, with particular emphasis on Vietnamese diaspora experiences.
Other projects include NYX4 (alternative pop exploring digital identity), LoveAnh (Vietnamese Future Pop bridging traditional đàn tranh with electronic innovation), and Salt & Nightingale (folk duo exploring generational memory).
But Terra Sol represents my most personal voice: the refugee child who drew in silence, the poet who wrote in margins, the composer who finally found a way to speak all his languages at once.