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Tracing Memories with a Diamond Stylus

Gentle Gazzetta Readers,

Memories are like vinyl records. The more you recount one the less accurate it becomes. You change it every time you retell it. If you listen now to a record you bought long ago but never played – never altered its surface with the touch of a stylus – it sounds perfectly clear and accurate, unlike one whose grooves have been traced repeatedly.

Mounting Memory Trace

The time has come to remind you of Memory Trace and to retell its dreams, textures, stories, and scents – altering and expanding them once more! In a few short days, I’ll be mounting a production of my latest solo intermedia performance work on the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum stage as the opening night of YBCA’s “New Frequencies Festival”. I hope some of you can make it out to see and hear it. For details about this and my many other upcoming events, scroll (or hyperly jump) down.

Tech university hopping...

The beginning quarter of 2016 has been a wild ride for me. I meant to cordon off these first months to concentrate on developing and rehearsing Memory Trace but, as is always the case with me, I managed to schedule the heck out of them. So I’ve been back and forth across the country playing gigs and doing visiting artist residencies at more major tech universities than you can shake a slide rule at.

In January, I gave talks and workshops at Caltech, where students and faculty gave me a campus tour including all things Feyman-esque and regaled me with delightful stories of the ongoing rivalry between Caltech and MIT. In February, I attended and performed at the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music conference at Georgia Southern University, where I was given the SEAMUS 2016 lifetime achievement award. In March, I did a 3-prong East Coast tour that included a visit to MIT – where I gave a concert, talked to music classes, and was told the other side of all the stories I heard at Caltech.

Then early this month, I spent a week at Virginia Tech where I worked grueling hours with Eric Lyon adapting existing works and creating a new work for the CUBE – a remarkable space designed by ARUP with a 150 speaker array for sophisticated sonic spatialization. That trip was exhausting, but very rewarding. The work sounded amazing in the CUBE, and my lodging was at Eric’s home (aka “Lyon Spa”) where I was treated to freshly-baked bread, delicious vegetarian and pescatarian home-cooked meals, and all the red wine I could ask for. Eric even made me Irish Whiskey Porridge for breakfast one morning. (I know, right?)

...and more performing

The other parts of my east coast tour included solo performances at the Met Museum’s new “Met Breuer” in New York as part of a series curated by Vijay Iyer, and a concert at the Phillips Collection in DC, where I performed with an incredible ensemble (including Lina Bahn, Matt Haimovitz, and John Pickford Richards) playing music of Steve Antosca. It was a thrill to see all the amazing work in that collection, and to perform in a gallery where Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party hangs with nary a rope and stanchion separating us from it.

I did my share of performing at home in March as well – with a concert at the new Berkeley Art Museum and a little club gig at Monarch SF. I also showed work (”Suitcase” from my Baggage Allowance installation) at the Exploratorium as part of their Extended Cinemas exhibition.

Plenty of art to see and hear

With this clearly jammed schedule, I still managed to take in some art at home and during my travels. Experiencing other people’s works is such an important part of my life and practice as an artist that I can never omit that activity no matter how over-booked my schedule becomes.

I attended the San Francisco Tape Music Festival in January and heard large scale works by François Bayle and Francis Dhomont beautifully diffused in the Gray Area Grand Theater. And I saw Ellen Fullman’s culminating Long-Stringed-Instrument performance at the end of her residency at the Lab. I attended the first BAM/PFA "Full" (a new series curatate by Sarah Cahill that occurs on each full moon) and saw lots of amazing work in their galleries.

Back in San Francisco, I attended the entire Other Minds Festival in March. It was bittersweet knowing that it was to be the last one of its kind, but I think Charles Amirkhanian really outdid himself with the curating this time. From exciting works by the likes of John Oswald, Cecileie Ore, Gavin Bryars and Phil Kline to the beautiful final evening – a full program of Meredith Monk – the festival was truly delightful from beginning to end. There was also a wonderful San Francisco Contemporary Music Players program at Z Space that included Steve Schick’s brilliant interpretation of Mark Appelbaum’s Aphasia, and there was an arresting performance by the inimitable Chris Mann at the Lab.

If left to my own devices, I would be running out to see more art right now, but I have to be stopped. I need to stay in my studio and focus on the task at hand – preparing to mount the new, expanded version of Memory Trace at YBCA! After that, there’ll be plenty of time for promiscuous performance venue and gallery hopping. Until then, it’s back to work! (As always, read on for upcoming details...)

Love,

PZ

PZ performing at BAM/PFA "Full: Voice"

PZ at the Met Breuer

Mural of Feynman diagrams at Caltech

PZ standing on Sol LeWitt at MIT

Meeting with Virginia Tech President in the CUBE

Irish Whiskey Porridge

Hear no evil, speak no evil, Pinot Evil. (Eric Lyon & PZ after the CUBE gig)

Lina practicing in front of the Renoir

DJ Chessa spinning at BAM/PFA "Full"

Meredith on stage at Other Minds

Duchamp at MoMA

Ellen Fullman performing with Luciano Chessa at the Lab

Chris Mann performing at the Lab

Living art on the steps at MoMA

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upcoming event details:

Pamela Z's MEMORY TRACE at YBCA,
Thursday, April 28, 2016, 8pm

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts will present Pamela Z's intermedia perfomance work Memory Trace as part of YBCA’s New Frequencies Festival at Yerba Buena Center For the Arts on April 28th at 8pm in San Francisco, CA.

Memory Trace is a solo performance work exploring various aspects of memory through voice and electronics, multi-channel video, sampled text fragments, and gestural movement. This work, which grew out of an interactive media installation of the same name, was workshopped at New Music New College in Sarasota, FL and in a three-night run in the intimate San Francisco Royce Gallery in 2015, and now a large-scale version will be mounted at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum space in April of 2016

"I can still remember the time in the early nineteen nineties when I first purchased memory. I delighted in the fact that I could hold it in my hand: a thin, green wafer etched with a lattice of metal lines.  And I quickly noticed parallels between the computer’s memory and my own. Prone to anthropomorphism, I continue to compare and often confuse the two. I am interested in exploring how humans and computers store memory.  How do they 'misplace' information and how do they lose it entirely? How can we differentiate between dreams, 'real' and 'manufactured' memories? How do certain sounds and aromas trigger very old memories?"

Memory Trace explores these questions through a series of dreamlike sonic and visual episodes of remembering and forgetting.

This April 28th production of Memory Trace is being presented by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as the opening night of the New Frequencies Festival. The festival continues on April 29th with a double bill featuring Theresa Wong's The Unlearning and Edward Shocker's Crossing Ensemble, and finishes on April 30th with Luciano Chessa: A Restrospective.

Memory Trace was made possible by grants from the San Francisco Art Commission, the Center for Cultural Innovation, and the Zellerbach Family Foundation.

Yerba Buena Center For the Arts Forum
701 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA

Click here for Memory Trace Tickets and Information.