Member Since: 10/3/2006
Band Website: pamelaz.com
Band Members: Pamela Z: Voice and Electronics
www.pamelaz.com
Influences: 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
Record Label: Starkland
Type of Label: Indie