This is Pamela’s Bio.
Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist who works primarily with voice, live electronic processing, sampled sound, and video. A pioneer of live digital looping techniques, she processes her voice in real time to create dense, complex sonic layers. Her solo works combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, digital processing, and wireless MIDI controllers that allow her to manipulate sound with physical gestures. In addition to her solo work, she has been commissioned to compose scores for dance, theatre, film, and chamber ensembles including Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, the Bang on a Can All Stars, Ethel, and San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. Her interdisciplinary performance works have been presented at venues including The Kitchen (NY), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), REDCAT (LA), and MCA (Chicago), and her installations have been presented at such exhibition spaces as the Whitney (NY), the Diözesanmuseum (Cologne), and the Krannert (IL). Pamela Z has toured extensively throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. She’s a recipient of numerous awards including the Rome Prize, United States Artists, a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation residency, the Guggenheim, the Doris Duke Artist Impact Award, Herb Alpert Award, an Ars Electronica honorable mention, and the NEA Japan/US Friendship Commission Fellowship. She holds a music degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Sonic Gestures
This installation was a 360 degrees video experience with multi-channel audio. The piece uses the space as an interactive experience for the visitor. The description didn’t speak on the meaning behind this and I’m definitely impressed technically by the work presented to her. I do wish I could receive an explanation and perhaps in the lecture I will. I’m wondering how the 360 video sync was done. Did they start the video at the exact same time? This is an interesting thought into the production that does give me questions.
The audio for this was layered collaged sounds, whispers and speaking. It definitely relates well to the visuals going on. Again I find sometimes with these works that it’s challenging to understand, although I know it’s not the point. But to enjoy it for what it is, which I definitely do.
Echolocation
This was a re-release of an album Pamela made in 1988. This was at a time when Pamela was playing music at a local radio station. Spanning from the Ramones to Pauline Oliveros. She then decided to create something that situated herself within what she loved listening to. She started playing around with tape and a delay pedal and this was what was created. I listened to the first song Echolocation. I found it very abstract, with the delays creating a rhythmic pattern within it. I can see why the digital delay pedal was important for her work. I also listened to Two Black Rubber Raincoats and it had similar production techniques to the first song Echolocation. The rhythmic vocals as an instrument, then with a lead vocal singing over the top. I listened to the rest and the contrast between more commercial pop 80s sounding music and the more abstract ones were great and I enjoyed In The Other World the most out of them all.
Wire mix: Pamela Z – The Wire
In this short interview, Pamela reveals her ideas about using her voice live. She tries to use language people recognise and then take it out of context to create new meanings. She says she enjoys looping, sampling and taking a recorded vocal she has into a different context. To make the listener perhaps at first understand what is going on, to know the word she is saying but after a short while it’s flipped out of context to create something new. She also created a 1hr radio mix in which I listened to a few songs. I can see how she situates herself within her field. I always find it interesting when I don’t necessarily understand a scene or musical genre then when revealed to more artists within that field I can gain a greater understanding of how it works.
Post Lecture Reflection
Pamela begins by speaking that she was initially a musical artist and now it’s changed towards more as a composer and sound artist. She says she is more known for her voice composition and her use of wireless midi controllers. Live processing and looping, she creates performance work that is rhythmic and abstract sometimes in nature.
Pamela begins to show an extract of her performance, She uses the theremin it seems and sings in a similar way that opera singers do. It’s very ethereal and her hands seem to be conducting the sound. The looped voices create a rhythm and then she seems to solo over them. She also is reading a book while she does her performances. As well as in another context using the sound of water and looped life into her performance. She appears to have an electronic device on her hand on the other side of her palm. That I assume controls the wireless midi modulation she speaks about. She seems to be triggering samples with her hands to imitate a typewriter.
She considers her instrument to be her voice and this is the instrument that she uses. She’s been composing since the 1980s and the tools have changed since back then. When she first started to do what she does now she used to use specific devices such as outboard rack-mountable samplers and effects units. With a mixer on the top. It was heavy and impractical.
She finally decided in 1999 to port all the functions to software. With Maxmsp she started creating patches to create a software creation of the hardware rack she created. The patch was long and complicated due to code and she had to create it all herself and she managed. Over time the technological upgrade became difficult as she had to change versions and this meant issues with Mac OS and other software to make sure everything worked together.
The way she works with voice and electronics are constantly evolving with tools and technology but has remained quite similar over the years. She works with delay since the first original performance she made. When everyone was using hardware she was amassing lots of black boxes. The analogue delay machines were different every day. The delay wouldn’t always be at the time she set. It changed a lot when using software and computers. It became more accurate and more specific.
Her pieces tend to be short, 4-5 minutes. But over the years with her theatre and compositional pieces. It made her think about making pieces over a whole performance in a more modular way. She made a piece of being a foreigner in a place you live. It involved her and two other dancers. Then she made other large scale performance works, in 2010 she made one called baggage allowance. The concept of literal and metaphorical baggage. The most ambitious work she made to that date. It included a performance and a gallery exhibition with objects and sound and an online website exhibition. It was mainly available in flash programming and this has become ancient architecture.
She then shows us an excerpt of the baggage allowance performance in New York. The music is a performance with her looping her voice. Alongside a video that plays, describing the baggage people carry in their luggage. She brings out her suitcases, to show the baggage we carry, onto the stage.
In her other installation, the first thing the audience would be confronted with when entering the gallery was an X-ray and the public would have to put their luggage through the x-ray and certain objects would appear that she coded. Either a gun, a bird, a heart. Inside their bag, it would appear to have these objects inside.
She also created a screen within the other luggage trunk. And when you opened a draw it would trigger samples and sounds as well as an image with the screen. the items within the luggage and different objects would view on the screen and then you would hear the sounds associated with the object.
Another piece was called Suitcase. It was probably her favourite although not that complex it was one that was very effective for people. Either charming or kind of creepy and she believed that it was based on the scale. A small suitcase 24 inches wide. A full-grown woman was asleep inside of it and when you walked past you could see a full-grown woman in there. There would be whispers of her voice recorded within the installation of this woman asleep and this would freak people out.
In 2007 she was commissioned for a new media gallery to create an immersive setup. In a room that was 36ft long. With ten frame locked channels. With HD screens edge to edge. 16 channels of surround audio. Something site-specific for that room. An eighteen-minute loop, of her singing and time-stretched hand claps. And a chattery section with her, not a smartphone she owned. She also made a piece called the long URL.
The piece went dormant because there wasn’t another gallery that could serve the piece in a gallery. In 2019 this was shown in two other galleries. So although her work over the years has had some presence in the visual arts. It’s not so much a shift but an expansion. But although this is broadening, in her practice the sound is always the centre point.
When she starts any of her work the first thing she does is record interviews with a number of people. She uses the interview material for inspiration for her work and to compose. Pamela then shows us an excerpt from memory trace (2012) It was an interview of people saying they can’t remember and she loops up the voices into a rhythmic piece.
She also involves herself in producing for a string quartet. She uses video as a graphic score for the string quartet. On the tv behind them. The idea was for the string quartet to continue the score despite all these distractions and interruptions. The players are sort of forced to shift their attention and multitask their way through the piece.
She has also composed scores for dance and film throughout her career. Creating numerous sound pieces for interpretive dances. Because of covid, her reality of physical pieces and installations changed, and she made more of an incentive towards studio practice. She was able to do one of which was a new record which was released last year called A Secret Code. It’s been years since she’d had a cd release. The last time was in 2004.
She wanted to do performances that were more towards the idea of a different performance when doing them online. Instead of being a shadow of what we were used to. To have a show that will use the idea of online live streaming to its advantage. Using projected videos and video feedback loops. And the intimacy that a webcam gives.
Overall I was very surprised by Pamela’s lecture. I did go in thinking it would be very Avangard and hard to wrap my head around her work, similar to a few others in the past. But I decided to take the parts I found interesting. Her use of the midi controller she has built and designed. The adaptability within her performances, and the multidisciplinary approach she has when doing her work, for others and different art fields. For example theatre and film.