PAMELA Z
A DELAY IS BETTER
STARKLAND CD
May, 2005
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 oldest things here are Pop Titles 'You' from 1986, which uses the Y section of a catalogue she found while working at Tower Records, and Badagada from a couple of years later, a useful glimpse of her early experiments with delay effects. The real standouts are Geekspeak (1995), which plays with our technical obsessions, and the closing Obsession, Addiction, And the Aristotelian Curve (1991), a collaboration with harpist Barbara Imhoff made in tribute to Pauline Oliveros, who wrote the liner note, which brings the thing full circle, just like a Pam Z composition. Essential.
– Brian Morton
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