Avant-garde Pioneer Pamela Z in Chicago, Previewed

Source: Chicago Reader.

Trailblazing avant-garde musician, sound artist, and composer Pamela Z, who gives a rare Chicago performance at Constellation on Saturday, began experimenting with vocal processing in the early 80s, but the first album devoted entirely to her work didn’t arrive till 2004. On “Bone Music,” the opening track of A Delay Is Better (Starkland), her voice rises in swells over thudding percussion, then plummets into speech—only it’s not quite speech. Her words, if they’re words at all, are impossible to make out. Her voice is joined by others, frantic and urgent, forming a frenzied babble that spins and disappears in a whirl.