American & European Avant-garde, Italian Opera, Punk Rock & New Wave, Minimalism, dadaist and surrealist visual artists, British invasion rock, experimental theatre, text-sound poets, Isreali folk music, Japanese experimental dance, electro-acoustic pioneers, environmental sounds, language.
Sounds Like
"Sheer genius from the most gifted and enterprising vocalist/composer/audio artist in the US since the heyday of Joan La Barbara and Mededith Monk. The voice is strong enough on its own to move, but Z has extended her repertoire enormously, using found percussion (like the five gallon water bottle on Bone Music), concrète samples, synchronous and asynchronous choral effects and the gesture-controlled BodySynth. The effects are stunning."
– The WIRE
"Pamela Z — the extraordinary Bay Area composer and performer ... has a gracious manner, a rich, alluring voice, a dry sense of humor and a style of performance that is sometimes compared to Laurie Anderson...Pamela Z's "Ethel Dreams of Temporal Disturbances" for string quartet and electronics was here more John Zorn than Laurie Anderson, with its bits of Beethoven, television tunes and Ethel Merman, all amusing. Again, one wanted more." – Los Angeles Times
"Ms. Z, a well-known figure on the international contemporary music circuit, is a wonderfully compelling performer with a lot of range. Wired with a device touted in the program as a BodySynth, which translates a performer's gestures into manipulations of sound, she pushed her performance to the edge of dance with hand and arm movements that created clicks, tones or, in one number, bird songs. Singing a note into a microphone, she electronically repeated it and altered it and sang in duet with it until she had created a layered soundscape, an ensemble made only of herself, sounding now like a baby's cry, now like the song of a bird, now like a disapproving superego, now simply like a trained singer in full cry." – The New York Times
"While Z's work can be intriguing on record, the dimension of live performance is the real deal, a much deeper and truer forum for what makes her work special. Z transcends the kind of dry, hermetic nature of much electronic music, by adding elements of dancer, performance artists, digital shaman, and generally charismatic stage presence.
She duly reminds us of the importance of the live real time event, an element as rooted in ancient culture as it is in any kind of new music enterprise." – The Santa Barbara News Press
"Z is an experimental musician making future sounds for right now, a musician who doesn’t shrink from the knowledge that since the work of John Cage and the development of the synthesizer, sonic forays have evolved to a whole other ball game. The biggest new thing to hit modern experimental music since Meredith Monk, this woman is not to be missed in concert." – The Brooklyn Rail
"Z's turning point was the discovery of the digital delay and the idea of repeating, looping and layering sounds, which grew out of experiments with tape loops from the '60s and '70s, and which she has now elevated to a sophisticated art form, with the help of her laptop, mixer, foot pedals and the motion-oriented "BodySynth" which triggers incidents based on her dance-like gestures." – The Santa Barbara News Press
Pamela Z's video and sound installation "Sonic Gestures":
Pamela Z has scheduled another SoundWORK (six-week Sound & Performance Workshop) starting September 13th on Saturdays 2pm- 5pm, in San Francisco. You can learn more and enroll at pamelaz.com/soundwork.html
Pamela Z's CD "A Delay is Better" is available at:
CD Baby
and Amazon.com
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Pamela Z is a bi-coastal (San Francisco/New York-based) artist who The Wire describes as “the most gifted and enterprising vocalist/composer/audio artist in the US since the heyday of Joan La Barbara and Mededith Monk.” She works primarily with voice, live electronic processing and sampling technology. Processing her live voice through “MAX MSP” software on a PowerBook, she creates solo works that combine operatic bel canto and experimental extended vocal techniques with found objects, text, and sampled concrète sounds. These sounds are often triggered via custom MIDI controllers such as Ed Severinghaus’ BodySynth-- or Donald Swearingen’s Light SensePod, both of which allow her to manipulate sound with physical gestures. Her performances range in scale from small concerts in galleries to large-scale multi-media works in flexible black-box venues and proscenium halls.
Pamela Z has toured extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. She has performed in numerous festivals including: Bang on a Can at Lincoln Center in New York; the Interlink Festival in Japan; Other Minds in San Francisco; and Pina Bausch Tanztheater's 25 Jahre Fest in Wuppertal, Germany. She has composed, recorded and performed original scores for choreographers and for film/video artists, and has done vocal work for other composers (including Charles Amirkhanian, Vijay Iyer, and Henry Brant). Her large-scale, multi-media performance works, Parts of Speech, Gaijin and Voci, have been presented at Theater Artaud and ODC Theater in San Francisco, and at the Kitchen in New York. Her new one-act opera Wunderkabinet (co-composed with Matthew Brubeck) premiered in 2005 at The LAB Gallery in San Francisco. She has had audio works included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Erzbischöfliches Diözesanmuseum in Cologne, the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs NY, and the Dakar Biennale in Sénégal. Her work has also been presented at the San Jose Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio in New York, and La Biennale di Venezia in Italy. Pamela Z received an honorable mention from Ars Electronica 2008 (Linz, Austria) for her multi-channel audio work Timepiece Triptych.
Ms. Z has been commissioned to compose works for new music chamber ensembles: the Bang On A Can Allstars; Ethel, the California E.A.R. Unit; the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble; and the St. Luke’s Chamber Orchestra. Since 1986, she has been producing “Z Programs”, an ongoing series of interdisciplinary events in which her own work has been featured along with that of other experimental artists in various genres. She has collaborated with a wide range of composer/performers, media artists, and choreographers including Miya Masaoka, Joan Jeanrenaud, Jeanne Finley + John Muse, Shinichi Momo Koga, Leigh Evans, and Jo Kreiter. She has participated in several Zakros New Music Theatre events (including their John Cage festivals), and has performed with The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. Pamela is the recipient of numerous awards, including: the Guggenheim Fellowship, the CalArts Alpert Award in the Arts; the Creative Capital Fund; the ASCAP Music Award; and the NEA and Japan/US Friendship Commission Fellowship. She holds a music degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder. For more information, please visit: pamelaz.com
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It is great to be connected with a fellow creator. Your work is so very interesting and you reach out to so many. Thanks for joining forces in friendship and sharing your gift with me and all of vast space. I will share more of my gift with you as I complete it.
