Pamela Z

*2022 stock.* 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?