Pamela Z CCAM 11/1/24

 Pamela Z is a woman of color, by that, I mean many colors.  An experimental musician, she uses voice and electronics as her color palette to compose elaborately layered washes of sound. The CCAM (Center for Collaborative Arts and Media at Yale) nerds have done it again. CCAMandant in chief RossWightman scours the outer reaches of the music art nexus for fascinating speakers and performers. PZ looks to be 60ish with oversized pink rimmed glasses, black gauzy attire, a rapunzelesque tangle of braids. Her boots look like they were fashioned on Argus 4, in the Shamwow galaxy. Wightman started with some questions. We learn that Z watered the seeds of avant garde while working at a college radio station in Boulder. Moving to the west coast and starting as a singer songwriter, she quickly realized that what was on her turntable was not what she was performing in clubs. A couple of analog delay pedals, and she was off to the races. Since the late 80s, PZ has circled the globe occupying countless residencies and performing live. Look on Spotify and there is little audioprint for this artist, that is due to the nature of her work best experienced live or as an installation. She took the stage armed with a laptop and two effects “boxes”. The smaller one emitted percussive sounds while the larger one spewed tones and word fragments. She used her hands to wave at these boxes to thereminic effect. The first piece had Z looping herself counting in different languages, stretched and magnified, and funneled through the top tier CCAM soundsystem, it felt like a hundred Zs counting in sensurround. The next piece had her typing a letter to her pen pal, with the percussion box acting as a Smith Corona complete with the carriage return ding. Next up she struck some tuning forks and smushed some bubble wrap into the looper. When replayed upon itself ad infinitum, the sound was deafening as if we were sitting inside a crackling fire. She then pulled out a keyboard that made bird calls with different keys. She mimicked these calls with her voice and phased them backward with the canned sounds. The timing came into phase then moved back toward cacawphony. The final piece sounded like a conversation with a boyfriend, she looped her voice and his voice into submission. His cadence became a bass loop and she layered herself on top. At this point, I notice she has small boxes on each wrist that interact with the stationary boxes as she gestures that manifest in sound. Fascinating artist and fascinating show.