Label: Neuma Records

激高内容!!秀逸なボイス加工作!!1956年ニューヨーク出身、ジョニ・ミッチェルのカバーからジョン・ケージ、ヴァレーズ、ラモーンズ、ポーリン・オリヴェロスの楽曲演奏を行い自身の音楽性を磨いた女性コンポーザーPamela Z。音声、サンプルサウンドを用いたライブエレクトロニクスを得意とするパフォーマー及びメディアアーティストであり、なんと80年代から活動をしていながら本作が3rdアルバムという寡作な作家。ダンス用、クロノス・カルテットの為の楽曲、ライブ・サンプリング・パフォーマンスの楽曲等々、自身のボイスをカットアップ〜小刻みな反復で配置したひたすらに格好良いボーカル・アルバム。







Everyday experience is never far from Pamela Z’s musical world. Whether it be a typewriter, birdcall, checking in at the airport, or a mess on the street, her creatively quirky imagination transforms it into a moment of profound questioning and wonder. From sonic trifles to complex numbers, the works on A Secret Code – only her third solo album after Echolocation (1988), and A Delay is Better (2004) – span two decades of redefining song.

As fellow composer Annea Lockwood writes in the album notes, “I have long treasured Pamela Z’s work for its vigor, inexhaustible ideas, fluid intricacy of texture, and for its sheer joyousness. An infectious, often surreal humor runs through the whole album, brilliantly upending everyday experience. The letter she is typing disintegrates, flare stains on a road become animate, and in Unknown Person even the TSA’s mundane but weighted questions are subverted, and disintegrate in the hilarious list of packed garments and hopes which follows. Voice, the most intimate of instruments, is a shape-shifter in her hands, transformed by gestural control and electronics in her performances and mutating, time-stretched and compressed as Timepiece Triptych, and throughout her work, with a dazzling compositional virtuosity.”

Including works made for dance, for Kronos Quartet, as well as for Z’s own live-sampled concert performance with bel canto, bubblewrap, and tuning fork options, A Secret Code is not as esoteric as it may sound. Besides, as the ever-philosophical TSA so often asks, “What is the purpose of your travel?”

San Francisco-based composer/performer and media artist Pamela Z works primarily with voice, live electronic processing, sampled sound, and video. A pioneer of live digital looping techniques, she processes her voice in real time to create dense, complex sonic layers. Her solo works combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, digital processing, and wireless MIDI controllers that allow her to manipulate sound with physical gestures.