BIO: Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist making works for voice, electronic processing, samples, gesture activated MIDI controllers, and video. She has toured throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. Her work has been presented at venues and exhibitions including Bang on a Can (NY), the Japan Interlink Festival, Other Minds (SF), the Venice Biennale, and the Dakar Biennale. She has composed scores for dance, film, and chamber ensembles (including Kronos Quartet and Eighth Blackbird). Her awards include the Rome Prize, United States Artists, the Guggenheim, Doris Duke Artist Impact Award, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Herb Alpert Award. www.pamelaz.com
Early in her career Pamela was considered to be just a musician, however her practice has evolved in scope to the point she names herself; composer, sound artist, videographer, artists etc.
Collage of work: Almost operatic in tone, Pamela loops vocal gestures and layers them until they take on a life of there own. She also enhances theses vocal performances by reading prose and written text, and also concrete samples. From what it seems her live practice explores performance and a synthesis between her voice and electronics.
Back in the day, her setup would consist of a stack of affects racks with a mixer on-top, all patched together. She eventually replaced this hefty live setup into a software patch via Max MSP–renaming her patches after the physical hardware she was replacing.
MAX-MSP: Max Signal Processing , or the initials Miller Smith Puckette), it remains the most notable of Max’s many extensions and incarnations: it made Max capable of manipulating real-time digital audio signals without dedicated DSP hardware.
Originally her performances were made up of short 4-7min pieces, very similar to a pop song format. She then became interested in perforce and integrating multimedia aspects into her live shows such as samples, collages, dancers, satire. Ultimately becoming full length modular pieces that flowed and evolved as the show went on. A huge jump away from her earlier practice.
Baggage Allowance–Installation/Live Performance—This was originally conceived as a installation featuring found objects such as suitcases, antique wardrobe trunks, bag x-rays (that superimposed fake objects into the audiences bags). The suitcase, 24inches wide, had a woman going to sleep projected into the suitcase so the audience could look down into the suitcase. Accompany all the pieces were related sounds, thus adding character to the the inanimate objects.
She then incorporated the this into a live performance.
http://www.pamelaz.com/baggageallowance.html
Sonic Gestures–Installation/Live Performance
“Sound remains central within her work”—–“Before creation she interviews people regarding her subject and then expands this into her work.” —–Pamela work is shaped by conversations and ironically other peoples voices before her own interprets these ideas. —–Links to my thoughts on art and the ego, and my research into Aural Histories.
Memory Trace–Sound Work (Potential inspiration for consequences of sound composition!) Fragments of speech collated together.
Pamela has composed many scores for dances and films. She likes to use found text and its–they can be tremendously poetic, a bit like rhyme but better due to its unpredictability. Within the formulaic and un-interesting, lists can become hypnotic and form there own rhythms that appear completley random. EXPLORE THIS———————-
Can there be chaos even in the formulaic?
Echolocation LP (First released on cassette in 1988)——–Listen