Pamela Z’s “Simultaneous” on Other Minds Records
Pamela Z: Simultaneous
October 24, 2025 as an LP, CD, and digital download
RIYL: Laurie Anderson, Holly Herndon, Meredith Monk, Laurel Halo, Robert Ashley, Steve Reich’s Different Trains
SAN FRANCISCO—October 31, 2025—Other Minds is pleased to present Simultaneous by the San Francisco-based composer, musician, and live-vocal-looping doyenne Pamela Z.
Begun during her 2019 Rome Prize Fellowship, Simultaneous takes inspiration from Z’s fascination with simultaneous translation; the work for electronics and voices is built from over 30 interviews with her fellow Fellows about notable synchronous experiences. Conceived of as a performance piece, the global pandemic compelled Z to create the 44:33 version for radio that is presented on this album. As the critic Adam Shatz writes in his liner notes, “Simultaneous is, to be sure, a work of sound art, a collage produced in the composer’s studio. Nonetheless, it is also, unmistakably, a musical work…a reflection not only on its ostensible subject, but on the practice and experience of music.”
Simultaneous continues Z’s career-long fascination with the musicality of the spoken voice. “The work incorporates stories and tightly edited speech fragments,” she writes in her notes, “woven together with melodies, textures, and pitched and rhythmic motifs largely generated by the speech material.” In Simultaneous, the chorus of voices are never quite abstracted, but they are also never quite cogent. The experience of listening to the piece is akin to traveling in a foreign country after only half-a-year of language lessons: “speech as language” and “speech as sound” exist, well, simultaneously in the ear of the listener.
Simultaneous is out NOW as an LP, CD, and digital download and is available for order now. The album is available directly from Other Minds, our Bandcamp page, all major digital music outlets, and through our distributors The Business (USA) and SoundOhm (EU).
Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist working primarily with voice, live electronics, sampled sound, and video. A pioneer of live looping, she processes her voice to create 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. She has been commissioned to compose scores for dance, theatre, film, and chamber ensembles including Kronos Quartet, Roomful of Teeth, The Living Earth Show, Eighth Blackbird, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Julia Bullock with SF Symphony, and the LA Philharmonic New Music Group. Her interdisciplinary performances have been presented at venues including The Kitchen (NY), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), REDCAT (LA), and MCA (Chicago), and her installations have been presented at such exhibition spaces as MoMA (NY), the Whitney (NY), Savvy Contemporary (Berlin), and the Krannert (IL). Pamela Z has toured extensively throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. She has performed in numerous festivals including Bang on a Can (NY), Interlink (Japan), Other Minds (San Francisco), La Biennale di Venezia (Italy), Dak’Art (Sénégal) and Pina Bausch Tanztheater Festival (Wuppertal). She is a recipient of numerous awards including the Rome Prize, Berlin Prize, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, MIT McDermott Award, United States Artists, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Guggenheim, Doris Duke Artist Impact Award, Herb Alpert Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. She holds a music degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder.
