Making New Music with Her Voice and Electronics

Video, gesture, and spoken and sung words combine in avant-garde artist Pamela Z’s performances.
That’s not where she began as a musician back in the late 1970s. A music major who studied voice at the University of Colorado in Boulder, she was “working professionally as a singer-songwriter and singing opera arias by day in school.”
But by the early 1980s, her interests had turned “much more to the avant-garde. That didn’t necessarily match up with what I was doing as a musician.”
Then she saw a performer use a digital delay device, went out and bought one for herself and started processing her voice.
“It was the turning point that taught me a whole different structural and listening capacity,” said Z, who lives in San Francisco now, one of two urban crucibles for new music that Z loves. “My whole approach started shifting rapidly, and it kind of went from there.”