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.
Other Minds is proud to present Pamela Z’s Simultaneous on record, and to release it in conjunction with her appearance as part of the 29th Other Minds Festival, October 16th–19th, 2025 at the Brava Theater in San Francisco’s Mission District. On Night One of the Festival, Z presented Simultaneous in two iterations: 1) as an intermedia performance piece for voice and electronics, sampled speech, oboe/English horn, viola, cello, percussion, and multi-channel projected video, and 2) as a multi-channel sound installation within the Brava’s gallery space.
The stories of Simultaneous are interesting as sound, especially because Z arranges the voices so they waver between podcast-style intonations and operatic singing. And the personal accounts of coincidence are more than just amusing; they provide a way to think about the voice as granular material. Whispers sometimes seem to announce the minutiae of mouth sounds; a momentary echo effect highlights the drama of a wordless tone. More than anything, the draw is the specific qualities of everyone’s voice. Simultaneous makes it easy to appreciate speech in all that it signifies and all it can be.—Joshua Minsoo Kim
- Simultaneous: 44:33
Total time: 44:33
