• Freedom to Spend 2021

• Limited edition natural clear vinyl

• Includes download code

Echolocation is the debut album by Pamela Z, the pioneering Bay Area intermedia composer and performance artist. Written and recorded over three years, and self-released and distributed on cassette in 1988, Echolocation is a genre-defying document of Z’s earliest experiments with live voice and delay, and the impetus of an artist’s three decade search for sounds yet unfelt.

Z moved to San Francisco in 1984, legally changed her last name, and furthered her practice of vocal processing in live environments. A city simultaneously nurturing and stratifying the free spirit of the two decades prior, Z assumed an immediate role in the Bay Area’s interdisciplinary performance art scene, and began curating Z Programs, her own concert and event series. With a stage to workshop, the beginning pieces of Echolocation took form with the intuitive pairing of Pamela’s voice and an Ibanez DM1000, a digital delay unit with looping capabilities that would complement, and complete, her early craft.

Recorded on a Yamaha MT1X 4-track cassette recorder in the back room of an apartment Z shared with two other San Francisco musicians, Echolocation is a document of an artist finding her voice. Or in Pamela’s case, her voices. Outside of collaborations with Donald Swearingen and Bill Stefanacci on “I Know” and “An In” respectively, the album consists of live vocal and electronics compositions from her performance repertoire, and a few fixed-media pieces written, performed, and engineered entirely by Z, dutifully assuming and learning each mode as she went along. - Freedom To Spend

Click Below To Listen