Pamela Z: Singing the body electric

Combining digital technology with the human voice, Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT winner Pamela Z creates layered music from everyday life. In the mid-1980s, artist Pamela Z was working at Tower Records on Columbus Street in San Francisco, where one of her jobs was replacing pages in the store's Phonolog, an enormous alphabetized directory of all the music available at the time, which formed a kind of bible of pop. When she ripped one loose-leafed sheet from the book, she noticed that all the titles on that sheet began with "you." You stayed on my mind. You stole my heart. You stepped out of a dream. When spoken, the repetition of the words had an undulating, musical quality. It soon found its way into one of her electronic compositions, the found poetry processed with four-track cassette recorder, the simple list of phrases made incantatory through the looped rhythms of the human voice.