Other Minds is pleased to present Simultaneous by the San Francisco-based composer, musician, and live-vocal-looping doyenne Pamela Z. Begun during her 2019 Rome Prize Fellowship, Simultaneous takes inspiration from Z’s fascination with simultaneous translation; the work for electronics and voices is built from over 30 interviews with her fellow Fellows about notable synchronous experiences. Conceived of as a performance piece, the global pandemic compelled Z to create the 44:33 version for radio that is presented on this album. As the critic Adam Shatz writes in his liner notes, “Simultaneous is, to be sure, a work of sound art, a collage produced in the composer’s studio. Nonetheless, it is also, unmistakably, a musical work…a reflection not only on its ostensible subject, but on the practice and experience of music.”

Simultaneous continues Z’s career-long fascination with the musicality of the spoken voice. “The work incorporates stories and tightly edited speech fragments,” she writes in her notes, “woven together with melodies, textures, and pitched and rhythmic motifs largely generated by the speech material.” In Simultaneous, the chorus of voices are never quite abstracted, but they are also never quite cogent. The experience of listening to the piece is akin to traveling in a foreign country after only half-a-year of language lessons: “speech as language” and “speech as sound” exist, well, simultaneously in the ear of the listener.

Pamela Z’s Simultaneous is also available here as an LP.