Pamela Z’s Gray Sound Session

Pamela Z with her gear for her Gray Sound Sessions set (screen shot from the video being discussed)

Last night Pamela Z was one of two solo artists to participate in the seventh edition of Gray Sound Sessions. This is a weekly music-and-sound YouTube streaming series hosted by the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry in Chicago. Z’s set was entitled Other Rooms (and other works). As usual, her performance involved her vocal work, electronic gear, including sampling technology, and gesture-controlled MIDI instruments.

While Z’s voice is usually the only one encountered during one of her performances, “Other Rooms” was structured around the voice of the playwright Paul David Young. Z had interviewed Young while she was working on Memory Trace, a full-evening solo performance composition. (Readers that recall my Examiner.com articles may remember that Memory Trace was performed in August of 2015 and was recognized as that’s month’s entry in my “memorable concerts of 2015” article.) In “Other Rooms” Z extracted samples from that interview as a primary source for transformations engaged by her other gear.

The piece was woven into an overall fabric of other Z compositions. My only regret was that Gray Sound did not provide any information about what was being performed, neither before, during, nor after the performance itself. I would guess that roughly half of the set was familiar from past Z concerts. However, there was also the impression that the set in its entirety had its own sense of unity. As always seems to be the case, the performance was an engaging experience in which listening to the sounds Z evokes tended to blend informatively with the act of watching her at work.

Z’s set was preceded by Nomi Epstein’s Object Relations. Epstein described this piece as “multilayered with audio/video investigations into my experience,” that experience being her quarantine conditions since this past March. The audio was her “Solo for Piano part II: Dyads.” This is an open-form composition. The soundtrack consisted of the performance of this piece by Reinier van Houdt, taken from the album Nomi Epstein: sounds, with an overlay of Epstein herself performing a variation of the piece.

All this might have made for an absorbing listening experience. However, it had to contend with video content, much of which involved Epstein in her apartment under quarantine trying to figure out what to do with herself. The account of that content was frequently confusing, often crude in technique, and, for the most part, distracting from the music. These video images were coupled with split-screen shots of two pianists (perhaps the same individual) at two different pianos playing “Dyads” (or, perhaps, just appearing to play “Dyads”).

As a result, that aforementioned “experience” turned out to be, more often than not, running along the gamut from frustratingly annoying to hopelessly self-indulgent. Furthermore, the piece went on for more than its half-hour allotment. After I had more than enough, I shifted to setting up for viewing Z’s offering. If this is Gray Sound’s seventh offering, then I would have hoped that they would have cultivated enough experience to both supervise and present a somewhat more polished account. Still, even in the context of frustration with Epstein’s set, I found it a pleasure not only to listen to Z’s performance but also to watch her engagement with her gear.