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. Its antediluvian wails contrast with the quotidian inquiries that punctuate “Questions,” a piece toward the end of the collection. A chorus asks insistently, “Where are you going? What are you having? How is it ending? How was your trip?” while Pamela Z trills with tragic inflection: “By the time I got your message, you had gone.”
By then, Pamela Z was using polyrhythmic compositional structures and multiple delayed vocal lines. She was also experimenting with speech sounds unmoored from denotation, which has allowed her work to inhabit a linguistic world of its own. “Language is embedded with baggage,” she points out. “As long as the language is one that the listener is fluent in and understands, it’s impossible to strip it of its meaning.” To leave this baggage behind, she utters carefully chosen consonants, syllables, and diphthongs that are meaningful to her precisely because they lack meaning. “It’s not like I’m making up words because I don’t have enough words to say what I’m trying to say. I’m making up words because they’re less than actual words.” That is, the goal is to not say.
