Cover design for the album being discussed (from its Bandcamp Web page)
This coming Friday will see the release of an album presenting a single composition by Pamela Z entitled “Simultaneous.” She began working on this project in 2019 during her Rome Prize Fellowship. During that period, she made over 30 recordings of interviews with her Fellowship colleagues, all involved with accounts of synchronous experiences. The composition was then the product of combining segments from those interviews with electronic synthesis. The original plan involved “live” performance of the result; but the pandemic compelled her to realize the performance through a recording, whose duration was a little less than 45 minutes. That recording is the only track on the new album, which (of course) also has the title Simultaneous.
As a result of my background in digital technology, I have been following Z’s work for several years with great interest in how her vocal work is enhanced through electronics. As might be expected, most of the post-recording synthesis work has involved overlapping the content she had captured. The result seems to have been not so much a narrative thread as an exploration of different aspects of how simultaneity is achieved. Given that there are several aspects to explore, the overall duration amounts to an appropriate “fit” for the overall journey.
One might even say that Z’s venture into simultaneity could be taken as a “response” to the “call” of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s essay, “… how time passes …”!
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