The Anti-Avatar

The griot's exhortations inevitably express the history of the people through the history of the performer, and it is in this light that one must recognize, as Z does, that women performers, even those working with advanced technology, have been disproportionately channeled into vocal roles:

Of course, this kind of channeling is hardly limited to gender, and theorists such as bell hooks and Ruth Frankenberg have brought many feminists to the sometimes uncomfortable but unavoidable realization that gender and racial oppression are usually coterminous. In that regard, as critical race cybertheorist Alondra Nelson observes, “Racial identity, and blackness in particular, is the anti-avatar of digital life.”¹⁶

Certainly, the life and work of Cheikh Anta Diop, the Senegalese radiologist and national hero whose radical historical interventions resonated fiercely across the Afrodiaspora and beyond, provided strong evidence that the technological is hardly incompatible with African histories.¹⁷ During Diop's lifetime, however, similarly lionized literary figures of the Afrodiaspora also appeared to celebrate this supposed lacuna separating blacks from technology. A crucial passage from poet Aimé Césaire's 1938 Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land), for example, appears to base the purity of black subjectivity in nonengagement with technology:

The ensuing years have complicated the interpretation of this and similar passages, particularly in the wake of more recent scholarship (such as Diop's) that asserts historical and cultural continuity between the technologically advanced civilizations of ancient Egypt and the contemporary black diaspora.¹⁹

Writing in 2000, literary critic Abiola Irele contends that this section of Césaire's famous epic “derives quite evidently from a partisan rejection of the scientific and technological culture of the West,” but “beyond its polemical intent, the passage is also a poetic statement of an alternative path to knowledge—that of an intuitive grasp of a living universe in intimate relation to human consciousness and sensibility.”²⁰ Thus Irele concludes that the passage uses the technical nonproficiency of African civilizations as support for a “vibrant affirmation of racial pride.”²¹ Of course, the views of many producers and critics, both within and beyond the music industry, were hardly as nuanced as Césaire's, advancing often enough an oversimplified, essentializing view of black music as best served by a minimum of technological mediation. Norman Mailer, writing in 1973, went so far as to say, “Since the Negro has never been able to absorb a technological culture with success, even reacting against it with instinctive pain and distrust, he is now in this oncoming epoch of automation going to be removed from the technological society anyway.”²²

However, as Alexander Weheliye has maintained of a later, post-1990s R&B generation, “even though numerous cultural discourses have done their best to authenticate and naturalize the soul of black popular music, the musical practices themselves frequently defy these authenticating mechanisms by embracing new technologies, hybridities, and self-consciousness about the performative aspects of soul.”²³

To augment Weheliye's critique of cybertheory's apparent erasure of race (though concomitantly, as Weheliye maintains, “gender takes center stage”²⁴) it is worth noting that electronically assisted black resistance to naturalization has rather deep roots and, moreover, often appears in tandem with an assertion of mobility of practice designed to place artists beyond the reach of racializing genre markers.

For example, a powerful counternarrative to both genre typing and technophobia was articulated in the 1960s by a group of cosmopolitan black musicians of the 1960s, including three frequent collaborators from Chicago, Charles Stepney, Eddie Harris, and Muhal Richard Abrams. These musicians, despite a lack of institutional or foundation backing, were nonetheless early adopters of real-time electronic music technology to the extent that their resources allowed. By 1966, in the wake of his mainstream pop hit single, a jazz version of the Exodus film theme,²⁵

saxophonist Harris became one of the first musicians in any field to experiment seriously, in concert and on records, with the new real-time music technologies. Forging a trenchant connection between advanced electronic music techniques, extended acoustic instrumental technique, and down-home funk, Harris recorded pieces with real-time electronic sound processors such as the Varitone, a so-called octave divider that synthesized parallel octaves above or below the pitch of a horn, and the Echoplex, an early tape-based delay line noted for its portability.²⁶

In 1967, Abrams, cofounder of the African American experimental music collective the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM),²⁷

documented the first example of his long engagement with electronics. Each of the three pieces on Abrams's first recording, Levels and Degrees of Light, was awash in dense studio reverberation.²⁸ In the same period, legendary Chicago producer Stepney drew on the work of Russian musician and polymath Joseph Schillinger and American composer Henry Cowell in his innovative articulation of a form of “black psychedelia” between 1967 and 1971 with the Rotary Connection and the brilliant singer Minnie Riperton; hear, for example, Stepney's unusual and ironic version of Otis Redding's “Respect.”²⁹

However, the use of electronics by these artists, as well as the later work of Miles Davis, proved controversial and widely misunderstood in a world in which acoustic instruments became conflated with musical, and eventually, cultural and even racial authenticity. Critic Ron Welburn, apparently referring to Harris in Addison Gayle Jr.'s historically important collection of Black Arts Movement manifesti, The Black Aesthetic, felt that “black musicians should re-evaluate the technological intrusions now threatening our music; times may come when that technology will be useless. Our music is our key to survival.”³⁰

This variant of technophobia was shot through with ethnic essentialisms; for instance, rock musicians were said by Welburn to have emerged from “a technological lineage extending through John Cage, Stockhausen, Edgard Varèse, all the way back to Marconi and the wireless. White rock is a technology, not a real music.”³¹

To be sure, rock recordings being produced at this same time, such as the Beatles' 1967 Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, were not being policed for racial authenticity; free from these strictures, the Fab Four eagerly embraced studio techniques influenced by European composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen. Here, if Welburn's comments are considered in tandem with Theodore Gracyk's observation that rock artists used the studio in quasi-compositional fashion, while jazz recordings were designed to represent the live experience of music-making, the racialization of the discourse of studio practice becomes more evident than with Gracyk's account taken alone.³²

Thus, Davis's innovative album Bitches Brew, with its post-representation approach to the electronic manipulation of improvisation in a studio context, was criticized by Welburn and many others. “Electronic music,” Welburn wrote, “can make the black man blind from the sight of money and the white man rich on his deathbed, laughing absurdly at having fooled the niggers this last go-round.”³³

Moving towards the 1990s, it can be observed that despite the apparent acceptance of African American electronics in popular music, which Weheliye takes note of, experimental electronic artists of Z's generation and after still seem at times to be subjected to the old naturalizations, as a letter in the British magazine Wire from electronic musician Morgan Craft rather testily explained:

In fact, black experimental artists on both sides of the age of fifty divide shared Craft's dilemma, as literary critic Fred Moten succinctly notes:

As it happens, one of the most interesting commentaries is Z's own published essay from 2003, “A Tool Is A Tool,” not because it references race (it doesn't), but because it comes from a representative “anti-avatar” in the world of techno-experimentalism.³⁶

Voice, Culture, Identity

Certainly, artists such as Pamela Z reject the notion that electronics could be rigidly raced, and that any entry into the medium by African Americans necessarily constituted inferior imitation of white culture, economic opportunism, and/or general racial inauthenticity. Moreover, in Z's post-genre (and post-racial) experimentalism, we find a twinned practice of cultural mobility with self-determination that authorizes her to draw from any source, to deny any limitation whatsoever. This assertion of methodological and aesthetic mobility may be viewed as an integral aspect of the heterophonic (rather than simply hybrid) notion of identity found in her work. Z herself has remarked simply, “Many observers of my work seem to find strong implications of identity embedded in the work.”³⁷

This seemingly noncommittal remark can easily be interpreted as embodying a reluctance to foreclose the variegated play of meanings that her work, with its layered multiplicity, inevitably evokes.

Z's 2004 residency in Dakar for Dak'Art, the Biennale of Contemporary African Art, was her first visit to the African continent. She installed a site-specific sound work at the Maison des Esclaves on Gorée Island, the point du non-retour for the massive deportations on négriers, the ships that overflowed with human misery during the period of the Atlantic slave trade. The multiple cries and whispers that the piece presented, which I witnessed at the site, were sometimes barely audible in their understatement; Z's similarly understated proposal for the piece said that her initial visit to the site “stirred up a lot of feelings for me related to language and identity.”³⁸

At first blush, Z's classically trained vocal identity seems to defy easy identification with the set of vocal timbres most routinely identified as “African” or “Afro-American,” and consequently the association here may seem indirect for listeners and critics unfamiliar with the long history of engagement of Africans on both sides of the Atlantic with pan-European vocal tropes. In any event, for Z, “Being classically trained is just one of the millions of things that you could do if you are interested in exploring the human voice.”³⁹

Indeed, an introspective work such as The Larynx (2003), part of her suite Voci, takes as its subject the experience of singing itself. Its quasi-clinical examination of vocal production is presented as public transcript, pointing to an intimate relation between voice and identity that is asserted through its absence. Simultaneously, multiple Pamelas, heard through digital delay, constitute a hidden, private transcript that fragments experience, demonstrating how malleable, fluid, and ultimately transient our voices really are.

As Kali Tal points out, African American intellectual and social history “already provides political and theoretical precedents for articulating and understanding multiple identities, fragmented personae, and liminality.”⁴⁰

Paul Gilroy's expansion of W. E. B. DuBois's “double consciousness,” used to ground a dialogically rooted conception of a Black Atlantic, points to what cybertheorist Alondra Nelson describes as “a flux of identity that has long been the experience of African diasporic people.”⁴¹ Thus, we find Pamela Z's solo voice being continually transformed, multiplied, and detuned through digital and analog processing, breaking apart into a heterophony of perspectives that seem to exemplify Gilroy's and Kobena Mercer's understanding that identity, including black identity, is plural, polyphonic, and heterogeneous.⁴² “The essence of what I do straddles so many different things,” Z has said. “As a composer I require more than just a single voice…. I think most of the interesting music is being done by people who've been trained in varied of schools or traditions—who did more than one thing.”⁴³

Community and the Nomad

The large-scale, evening-length performance work Gaijin (2001) is an outgrowth of Pamela Z's six-month residency in Japan in 1999. The work combines electroacoustic sound, text, and projected video with Butoh performance, which Z studied in Japan. Z takes the general meaning of the Japanese word gaijin (foreign person) as a starting point to explore “the idea of foreignness—whether that means visiting a country you're not used to, or feeling like a foreigner in the place where you live, or all kinds of other ways that a person could feel foreign.”⁴⁴

The piece blends her own stories of her extended stay in Japan with other personal “foreigner” narratives.

At least since the adventures of Lafcadio Hearn, white visitors to Japan have long drawn upon a special trope of Otherness, in which the dominance of whiteness with which they grew up in their homelands is radically upended. Like Hearn, who first went to Japan in 1890, Z found that “one of the most profound lessons was finding out what it is like to truly be an alien in the place where you live.”⁴⁵

However, this trope becomes considerably and unavoidably altered when the subject singing of her Japanese experience is an African American woman who, as Michele Wallace and many other commentators have pointed out, sits as a group near the bottom of the U.S. social hierarchy.⁴⁶

Moreover, unlike many white Westerners, black Westerners coming to Japan are not encountering themselves as “the Other” for the first time, as Z's work points out. The complex Japanese language contains many different words signifying the relation between phenotype and ethnic membership; the term nihonjin denotes a person of native Japanese ancestry, while according to Joe Wood, whose travelogue “The Yellow Negro” recounts his 1990s-era visit to the country, the term kokujin refers specifically to “black foreigners”—in particular, persons who would be routinely raced as “black” or “African American” in the United States.⁴⁷

In Wood's account, the presence of both blackness and whiteness as objects of fascination in Japanese culture (however differently instantiated the two might be) focuses his attention; in a committed creative environment, however, these sorts of ethnic, racial, and gender essentialisms are inevitably tested and problematized. If Joni Mitchell's colleagues could tell an interviewer that the singer sometimes feels “like a black man in a white woman's body,”⁴⁸ Z's performance of “Other,” a movement within Gaijin, can frankly evoke the blues lament, while also asserting an ambivalent intimacy, as if she were in the room speaking only to you, the listener, but might be wary of an easy familiarity that might take too much for granted.

In Gaijin, Z's conscious articulation of the theatrical, a central aspect of art-song performance practice, becomes key to this testing. “I don't talk about it very often, but this idea of a character is really important,” she told an interviewer. “I assume some character in each of the pieces I perform.”⁴⁹

Critic Tom Sellar describes Z's performance persona this way: “Pamela Z stands with quiet assurance at a microphone console, building and inhabiting a lonely character who generates and absorbs the sounds around her.”⁵⁰ Thus, at short remove from the portrayal of foreignness is the dynamic of Verfremdung. Describing a section of Gaijin, Sellar felt that Z's harmonizing with “an endless loop of basic phonetics underscores her painful estrangement.”⁵¹

In a sense, standing all alone constitutes an important, if less frequently acknowledged subtext in Z's work. Indeed, Z's texts often present characters who function as solitary observers, wry commentators who are able to take part in the fray while standing at a remove. The tradition of the observer who points out the foibles in contemporary humanity is exemplified in American letters by the nineteenth-century writer Ambrose Bierce, though Z rarely indulges in the frank misanthropy and apparent hopelessness in which Bierce reveled. Rather, Z often finds humor in alienation, as her early influences Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell did years before. A sense of whimsy and a hint of irony are never far from her work; one broadly witty segment of Gaijin features her emulating Japanese enka-style crooning. The humor and pleasure that her work evokes undoubtedly contribute to the accessibility of Z's work to audiences who sometimes find computer-based work forbidding, or simply a bit wan.

The British-born Hearn must have experienced both the pleasure and the terror embedded in becoming a nomad. A key figure in the favorable interpretation of Japanese culture in Europe and North America in the late nineteenth century, Hearn's privately expressed bitterness at never becoming truly accepted, despite taking on a Japanese name and citizenship, speaking the language fluently, and marrying a Japanese woman, has only recently been documented via a letter he sent to a colleague in 1903.⁵²

Wood's text expresses a similar combination of alienation and fascination, his with the young Japanese kokujin ni naritai wakamono—“blackfacers” who mime blackness, a practice Wood sees as akin to white appropriations of black culture, albeit in a very different space from the American minstrel tradition. Z's travelogue asserts that a complementary transformation is available to her, but the work as a whole is not about black culture in Japan but about the foreigner in us all—a black nihonjin, rather than a yellow Negro. In the end, like Wood, Z's character is not immigrating but just passing through, evoking the experience of the visitor who relies on her own resources first and foremost, and who knows just how long she will be able to count on a warm welcome from her hosts.

For Canadian sound artist Kathy Kennedy, Pamela Z is an “electrodiva.”⁵³

The image of the diva certainly references the celebration of lonely, haughty unapproachability, but in Divas (2003), another section of Voci, Z confronts and even sends up the familiar image, singing an operatic lament, accompanied by a trio of video-projected virtual singers, one of whom functions as her Doppelgänger. Here, Z creates a virtual community through video, extending and complementing the sonic multiplicities she regularly presents. Further complicating the narrative of the solitary, Z's larger-scale works, such as Voci, involve interdisciplinarity and collaboration, particularly with film/videomakers Jeanne Finley and John Muse, designer Lauren Elder, lighting designer Elaine Buckholtz, kotoist and electronic musician Miya Masaoka, and digital instrument builder Donald Swearingen. Moreover, the socially articulated aspect of Z's work is nothing if not syncretic and collaborative, drawing from a panoply of sources and creative communities. This diversity clearly dates from her early experiences in San Francisco, where “I discovered a lot of micro-communities of electronic musicians, or performance artists, or dancers, or instrument builders, and I was always flitting from one world to the other.”⁵⁴

Certainly, the life and work of Maria Callas has brought a certain tragic loneliness to the image of the diva in popular culture, but in the end Z's work refuses tragedy. Pamela Z takes on many dramatis personae, but two that practically never appear in her work are the hysterical victim and the Medea figure so beloved by European opera. In general, Z's stage personae represent women in full control and authority—never confrontational, but powerful and confident. For Z, opera (and its bel canto evocation and extension in her work) does not lead inevitably, following Catherine Clément, to “the undoing of women.”⁵⁵

Collage, Bricolage, Delay

In a preconcert lecture in Los Angeles, I once heard composer Pierre Boulez remark that the taped collages that animate Edgard Varèse's 1954 composition Déserts were bound up with the sensibility of bricolage. The younger composer-conductor's use of the term was not meant as a compliment: Boulez was explaining why he did not use the tape in performance, against Varèse's specifications. Despite the rehabilitation of its meaning offered by anthropologists beginning with Claude Lévi-Strauss, in the French quotidian imagination (as well as Le Petit Robert) the word continues to mean “thrown together,” “makeshift,” “haphazard”—not a set of qualities generally regarded as salutary in the context of French musical high culture. In the American context, however, in which twentieth-century processes of improvisation formed the basis for a new, Afrodiasporic art music, the bricoleuse can become the discoverer of new vistas, the rugged American maverick individualist, the harbinger of change.

Pamela Z's already keen interest in language reached a higher and richer register with her discovery of the digital delay. “In 1982,” she told Sellar, “I went to a Weather Report concert and heard Jaco Pastorius do a solo on his fretless bass, during which he made a loop on a digital delay and played over it. I was so impressed that the next day I went out and got a digital delay.”⁵⁶

Here, one might observe that for Pastorius, as with Eddie Harris, the attraction to delay line technologies was fueled at least in part by the ready ability of the technology to instantiate, from a single source, both sides of the call-and-response dynamic of the African American musical culture with which their work was imbued. Z herself has observed that the digital delay, with its capability for instant, highly controllable recording and playback of complex sound material, “allowed me to create elaborate sound beds; it allowed me to become an ensemble, not just a singer.”⁵⁷

In fact, the early repetition-based minimalism that so entranced Pamela Z from her days in college radio in Boulder was thoroughly imbued from the outset with Afrodiasporicisms. In this context, it seems fitting that Steve Reich's 1966 tape delay–based work Come Out, composed during the same period as Harris's recorded experiments with the Echoplex, featured an Afrodiasporic resident of Spanish Harlem as the central sonic presence.⁵⁸

Reich's important 1971 work Drumming, sections of which pointedly recall the Northern Ewe music that Reich briefly studied the year before in Nigeria, became a seminal work of what came to be known as process music.⁵⁹

But there is much more to repetition than simple processual flow. As James Snead writes in his important essay on repetition:

The notion of the “cut,” or the assertion of and inevitable return to an originary source, is intrinsic to the phenomenology of the digital-delay line. For Snead, the cut, exemplified by the music of James Brown, “overtly insists on the repetitive nature of the music, by abruptly skipping it back to another beginning which we have already heard.”⁶¹

On this view, repetition actually brings materiality to sound: “The greater the insistence on the pure beauty and value of repetition, the greater the awareness must be also that repetition takes place on a level not of musical development or progression, but on the purest tonal and timbric level.”⁶²

Similarly, Pamela Z's digital delay line became a tool for the exploration of the material nature of spoken language:

Despite evincing a certain petulance in painting bass-baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as an agent of mass culture to disguise a lack of sympathy with his performance of Schubert lieder, Roland Barthes's 1972 essay, “The Grain of the Voice,” speaks powerfully of the relationships among voice, language, and the body. For Barthes, “The ‘grain’ of the voice is not—or is not merely—its timbre; the significance it opens cannot better be defined, indeed, than by the very friction between the music and something else, which something else is the particular language (and nowise the message). The song must speak, must write.”⁶⁴

What Barthes calls “the sung writing of language” is facilitated in Z's work by the use of digital electronics as an outil de bricolage par excellence. “When I started using samplers,” Z recalled in an interview, “I started detuning sounds, spreading a sound out over the whole pitch spectrum, sculpting found sounds as if they were notes, and playing samples of sounds and language in a pianistic way.”⁶⁵ Here, the materiality of language itself seduces both the theorist and the bricoleuse. Indeed, following Z's initial visit to Senegal,

Even now, Z is fascinated by the sheer sound of language, or what Barthes referred to as “that apex (or that depth) of production where the melody really works at the language—not at what it says, but the voluptuousness of its sounds-signifiers, of its letters—where melody explores how the language works and identifies with that work.”⁶⁷

As Z began to develop work on a larger and more complex scale, however, her encounter with language began to deepen, and new questions and challenges emerged. Her 1998 Parts of Speech, for instance, explored not only the materiality of language, syntax, and the human voice, but also the ways in which language projects codes of a gendered technology. The piece brings to mind a canonical Chomskyan example; here, “colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” as language is literally fragmented into “parts” of speech in order to reveal translation as a site for the projection of power.⁶⁸

Sound artist and poet Bruce Andrews has theorized at length about the possibilities and challenges that will emerge from this kind of “electronic poetics.” Andrews's collagist conception of language strongly recalls Z's frequent deployment of the term layers to describe her techniques of combining sonic (and later visual) imagery. Andrews raises the possibility of developing, via electronics and hypermedia, “‘agrammars’ of collage & multiple sequence … 'workings' of nonidiomatic, labyrinthine difference.”⁶⁹

Along the way, Andrews also raises another pertinent question, seemingly descriptive of Z's multilaminar approach to sound, language, and performance: “Can we lay out—sometimes keeping them present as separate & navigable layers—the alternative choices & building blocks of discourse as an array of hypermediated readymades, with the bleed-throughs of palimpsest-like sense solicited by the reading process?”⁷⁰

It is in this sense, finally, that Z's use of sound collage recalls that of Varèse, a celebrated resident of Greenwich Village who once performed his Poème Électronique at his neighborhood local, the Village Gate—a French composer gone native and appropriated by his adopted land after taking a long drink from the wellsprings of American bricolage. Z's multilaminar articulation of rhythmized language is intimately bound up with the possibilities of un bricolage numérique:

Z is well aware that the electronic medium offers a fundamentally different aesthetic and emotional experience, one that is not reducible to a simple replacement of the human by silicon. As she maintains, “There is a big difference between the identical repetitions that happen with delay loops and the changing repetitions that humans make. There is also a difference between one person's voice heavily layered and several different voices combining their timbres to make one sound. Both are good. Just different.”⁷²

Acoustic Ecology

In his important 1961 manifesto, Silence, composer John Cage, intending to distance our experience of sound from “taste” and “psychology,” described sound—all sound—as having four attributes: loudness, duration, pitch, and timbre.⁷³

However useful this view of sound might have been at the time as a way of orienting composers towards new vistas, it appears to founder on the shoals of our complex everyday experience. For those who maintain that sounds can exist autonomously, “in themselves,” lacking relationships to culture, history or memory, everyday life routinely provides powerful evidence to the contrary. Certainly in any major U.S. city, even very young children are obliged to learn a particular kind of acoustic ecology, one related to the survival value of parsing sonic utterance. In the words of one parishioner in a church in one of Chicago's poorest communities, “You could even hear the gunfire while we were singing.”⁷⁴

While not directly autobiographical, Z's work draws upon the acoustic ecology of her world. Her frequent use of field recordings recognizes the survival value in the human birthright of finding coherence in the environment, as it asserts the congruence of her sound-making, gesturing body with those around her. For Z, sound is connected with interactivity, connectivity, and empathy, and her strong affirmation of intentionality and personal narrative poses a considerable challenge to a post-Cage aesthetic stance based in sonic autonomy. Syrinx (2003) finds Z dialoguing with the sounds of birds, learning to sing in their languages and seeking deeper meaning in the sounds. Z's vocally constructed bird calls are transformed electronically, along the lines of Eric Dolphy's Messiaen-inspired improvisations.⁷⁵

For both Z and Dolphy, however, the sounds of the birds are not simply appropriated as sources in the way that dominant cultures have historically appropriated the labor of subaltern peoples. Rather, Z and Dolphy posit a dialogic relationship with the birds, assuming mutual sentience in the service of a dialogic imagination of subjectivity.

In Z's Voice Studies (2003), the multiplicity of accents that mark U.S. English serves as material for a pointedly political exploration of the relationship between vocal production and cultural expression. Z stands before the audience in the fashion of a prim motivational speaker, presenting the latest research, while a forest of vocal click sounds evoke the primordial all around her. The composer's brief but telling evocation of “vocal profiling” asserts the political in an offhandedly whimsical way that, far from making light of the experience of racism, clarifies the point at which the modalities of race and class intersect with the ecologies of sound. As Z has said of one recent work, “The stage is alive with unexpected visual and auditory transformations.”⁷⁶

The observation can be well taken to refer to Pamela Z's work as a whole, since her concept of “sound” becomes a metaphorical pointer to deeper levels of meaning beyond simple, objectified morphologies of pitch or timbre, and listening becomes an encounter with memory, identity, and history.