INTERVIEW
With your multi-faceted talents you sound like the child
prodigy type.
When did you begin your training?
I have
been making music and playing with sound all my life.
My first public performance was at age 5. My sister and I
sang "La
Cucaracha" in the Smedley Elementary School talent
show, using dried seed pods from neighborhood trees as "maracas".
My first formal training was when I started studying viola
in elementary school. Although I continued studying classical
music (mostly with a vocal emphasis) from that point on,
and majored in classical voice in college, I never had any
formal training in experimental music. I taught myself that
on my own and learned a lot from friends and colleagues in
the Bay Area New Music Community.
And you seem to be formally trained on a Mac as well. Did
you find it necessary to become equally proficient in technical
wizardry?
Well,
I actually started using a Mac back in the 80's (at the
very beginning of the Personal Computer revolution!)
My first computer was a Mac Plus (the little boxy one that
had no internal hard drive and had to have the system
loaded from a 400k floppy disk). I kind of fell in love the
the Mac instantly so it wasn't hard for me to become proficient.
I've been a died-in-the-wool Mac user ever since and
could never be swayed toward "Windows" machines (price
notwithstanding). I guess I must be part geek, so although
I'm self-taught where computer technology is concerned,
it hasn't been difficult for me to take on whatever software
and hardware has been necessary for making my art.
And, of course, I'm surrounded by a community of equally
enthusiastic geeks, so there are plenty of people to turn
to for advice when something is confounding.
Do you see many electronic/experimental musicians with classically
trained voices like yourself?
Not many, but there are some. My friend Amy X Neuburg is
a notable example. And of course there is Joan LaBarbara.
Also Dafna Naftali and Kristen Nordeval in New York to name
a few.
Are there any men doing anything like this?
Good
question! There are, of course, loads and loads of men
using electronics to make music. There are some who use
it in conjunction with acoustic instruments (on which
they are often classically trained). But there are very few
that I know of using it combined with classically trained
(or untrained for that matter) voice. One that comes
to mind is Thomas Buckner, a baritone who specialized in new
music. But Thomas is not the one usually doing the processing.
He collaborates with other musicians who use electronics.
I'm sure there are a few male singers out their processing
their voices, but I'm at a loss to come up with any names.
There are definitely some men using voice in experimental
ways, but even those are much more rare than women working
in that area. (I discuss this briefly in an article I
wrote for the MIT Press book "Women in New Media" http://www.pamelaz.com/tool.htm).
In some of your pieces you embrace the banal echoes of our
everyday lives--answering machine messages, sounds from objects
we interact with daily. I especially like your cell phone
concert in Japan. Tell me about that or another such project.
The cellphone
piece, which I call "Keitai" (the
Japanese word for mobile phone) was first developed in Japan.
I was fascinated by the number of people who had cellphones
and the wild array of ringtones.
This was 1999, when still only a handful of yuppies had them
in the states, but everyone had them in Tokyo. I made a piece
in two movements where I got the people on one side of the
audience to call the people on the other side and then do
the reverse. I later brought the piece back to the States
and made it into a section of my performance work "Voci" which
is all about voices.
"Voci" derives
most of its impressiveness from being, essentially, a
one-woman opera. Did it develop as a way to intertwine all
these experiments?
It's
not really an 'opera' in the true sense of the word, but
a solo, multi-media performance work. The first such work
I made on that scale was "Parts of Speech" (1998)
and it did come about as a result of my wanting to make a
full, cohesive work by connecting together a number of smaller
segments that related to language. "Gaijin" (2001)
and "Voci" (2003) came about in much the same way.
You also belong to several ensembles...
Those
ensembles are mainly ongoing projects of mine and the other
members which rear their heads intermittently rather than
being on a regular schedule of rehearsing and producing
work. For example, The Qube Chix (Myself, Leigh Evans,
and Julie Queen) only do things every couple of years or
so these days. Same with sensorChip (Myself, Miya Masaoka, & Donald
Swearingen.)
Do you think your concerts and compositions teach others
how to listen differently?
Well, it would be nice to think so.
What has taught you to listen differently?
Probably
the most influential factor was hearing (and seeing) the work
of other artists who I find quite inspiring. These range from
composer/performers and performance artists prominent in the
new music field to visual artists who work with installation
in various media. But one of the most profound changes
in my own listening that I can specifically remember was the
effect of experimenting with my first digital processor (an
Ibanez digital delay unit). That's something I can say really
taught me to listen differently and become aware of the effects
of repitition and layering etc.
The Body Synth has to be one of the most mentioned tools
in discussions of your work. What's the next breakthrough
in the music technology field?
Oh, who knows? It's funny that people like to focus so much
on my use of the BodySynth. I do use it regularly in my performances,
but I would say the most prominent tool I use is live processing
on my voice. But I guess people are really seduced by the
idea of an artist being able to control sound with physical
gestures. There are quite a few other gesture controllers
being used by various colleagues of mine in the field including
light sensors, video-based sensors, and various motion detectors.
People are always coming up with new things. Hard to predict
what might be next.
What's next for you?
I'm composing
an opera based on the Museum of Jurassic Technology.
I'm also planning to create a sound & video installation
about memory. And, very close on the horizon: in early
January, I am playing on a concert in San Francisco in which
I will control a Disklavier grand piano with the BodySynth
and with my voice through a pitch-to-MIDI converter.
For more
information, visit www.pamelaz.com.
