Amy X Neuburg

Biographies
Last updated spring 2011
[NOTE TO PRESS AND PRESENTERS: Before using any of these bios PLEASE CONTACT AMY. She may prefer to customize a bio for your purposes.]

"A one-woman musical hurricane" (Otago Times, New Zealand)

Shortish

AMY X NEUBURG (composer / vocalist / live electronics performer) has developed a unique career bridging the boundaries between classical, experimental and popular musics. Her 'avant-cabaret' songs combine her interests in poetry and language, expressive use of music technology (with an emphasis on live looping), and exploration of multiple genres using the many colors of her four-octave vocal range. As soloist she has performed at venues as diverse as the Other Minds and Bang on a Can new music festivals, the Berlin International Poetry Festival, the Wellington and Christchurch Jazz Festivals (NZ), electronic music festivals, colleges, clubs and concert halls throughout the US and abroad.

As composer, commissions for voices and chamber ensembles (often with looping electronics) include Robin Cox Ensemble, Present Music, Santa Cruz New Music Works, Solstice vocal ensemble, Christchurch Arts Centre chorus, Pacific Mozart Ensemble and Del Sol String Quartet. She has also composed extensively for theater and visual media, including Mondomedia's irreverent Piki & Poko web animations and numerous onstage collaborations with modern dancers. A classically trained vocalist, Amy has been featured in contemporary operas and recordings including works by Robert Ashley, Culture Clash and Guillermo Galindo. Throughout the '90s she sang and played electronic drums with her art-rock band Amy X Neuburg & Men, and she currently performs regularly with her Cello ChiXtet -- a cello trio with live electronics.

Amy received degrees in linguistics and voice from Oberlin College and Oberlin Conservatory and an MFA in electronic music from the Mills College CCM. Her many grants and honors include Arts International, Zellerbach, William & Flora Hewlett, Meet the Composer, The US Embassy New Zealand, LEF, SF Friends of Chamber Music, the Alpert/Ucross prize, Phi Beta Kappa and Pi Kappa Lambda.

LONG!

Singer, composer and electronic instrument performer AMY X NEUBURG has developed a unique career bridging the boundaries between classical, experimental and popular musics. She's best known for her wildly entertaining 'avant-cabaret' songs, which combine her interests in language, theater, expressive use of live music technology, and exploration of multiple genres using the many colors of her four-octave vocal range.

Amy is widely considered one of the most skilled and innovative practitioners of the live looping performance technique, in which a voice or other instrument is recorded live on stage, then played back and overdubbed with additional layers to construct a gradually building chorus or one-person band. Amy's unique approach to this technique involves the meticulous piecing together of loops, electronic sounds, and melodic poetry, all controlled on stage by a set of MIDI percussion pads. Her imaginative lyrics touch on the personal, the political, and everything in between with both clever wordplay and heartfelt poignancy, creating songs and stories that are at once intricately multi-layered and delightfully accessible. Amy has performed throughout the US and internationally at venues as diverse as the Other Minds Festival (Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco), the Berlin International Poetry Festival, the Wellington and Christchurch jazz festivals (New Zealand), The Warsaw Philharmonic chamber series, New York venues including Roulette, Joe's Pub, and the Bang on a Can Marathon at Symphony Space, and myriad college residencies and electronic music festivals at home and abroad.

In recent years Amy has expanded her live looping experiments to include acoustic chamber ensembles, layering small ensembles into large ones. Her recent project The Secret Language of Subways -- a 13-song cycle for voice, three cellos, looping and electronic percussion -- has seen high-profile performances at the San Francisco Symphony After-hours, the LA Philharmonic West Coast Left Coast Festival, and the Yerba Buena Center for Arts. She has received commissions (for works with and without electronics) from Pacific Mozart Ensemble chorus, Del Sol String Quartet, Santa Cruz New Music Works, Present Music (Milwaukee), the Robin Cox Ensemble (LA), the Christchurch Arts Centre (New Zealand), and The Jewish Music Festival, among others. For the JMF, Amy composed Fill as Desired -- a looped multi-language song cycle based on recipes collected by women of the Terezin concentration camp; the work is now in recording (2011) by Solstice vocal ensemble.

A classically trained singer, Amy has been featured in numerous contemporary works and recordings. She toured the US, Europe and Japan with three Robert Ashley operas and sang on the Nonesuch recording of Ashley's Improvement. She also sang and drummed with Culture Clash in their musical The Birds (music by Michael Roth), at the Berkeley and South Coast Reps, and she performed the leading role of Simone Weil in Anne Carson and Guillermo Galindo's opera Decreation: Fight Cherries at CCAC San Francisco. Other memorable vocal performances include a recital of Marc Blitzstein songs (with tenor John Duykers) at Other Minds' Blitzstein Centennial, and an appearance with Present Music singing Louis Andriessen's M is for Man, Music, Mozart.

Amy has composed extensively for dance and visual media. For modern dance, her music and sound-design credits include work with Cynthia Adams, AXIS, Sonya Delwaide, Joe Goode, Nina Haft, Thaļs Mazur, Claudine Naganuma, Randee Paufve, Nicole Richter, Terry Sendgraff and Ellen Webb; often Amy performs live on stage interactively with the dancers. She has composed for filmmakers Owen Land, Lynn Hershman, and Searchlight Films, as well as for local theater productions and art installations by PARC researchers (most notably Nightfall at Yerba Buena Center). In 2000/2001 Amy was composer for Mondomedia's irreverent Piki & Poko in Starland web animations.

As collaborator, Amy spent 10 years singing and drumming with her electronic band Amy X Neuburg & Men, who performed up and down the west coast and staged multimedia happenings such as the Virile Vednesdays at Venue 9 series and the Irish April Fool's Passover. Before that she was a member of the experimental music-theater ensemble MAP, with whom she CO-created the one-act musicals Walk Out and The Point, played in clubs, and performed socially relevant guerilla street theater. As a general partner of IS Productions Amy co-produced numerous experimental music and theater events, including the 2002 Electric Words Festival and large-scale theater performances by MAP and Amy X Neuburg & Men. Currently she is on the organizing committees for the This Here Show improv series and the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival.

Amy received undergraduate degrees from Oberlin Conservatory (Voice) and Oberlin College (Linguistics), and an MFA in Electronic Music from the Mills College Center for Contemporary Music. Among her influential professors were composers Conrad Cummings and Pauline Oliveros, and voice teacher Daune Mahy. Awards and honors include Phi Beta Kappa, Pi Kappa Lambda, Oberlin Conservatory Honors, the Wieland Prize for Vocal Excellence, and the Alpert/Ucross prize; residencies with Music Omi, Djerassi, and the Arts Centre of Christchurch; and grants from Arts International, the US Embassy New Zealand, Meet the Composer, the East Bay Community Fund, Zellerbach, SF Friends of Chamber Music, LEF, and William and Flora Hewlett. In 2005 Amy was featured in the book The Art of Digital Music: 56 Visionary Artists & Insiders Reveal their Creative Secrets (Backbeat Books), and she has been interviewed about her recording and looping techniques in Electronic Musician, Guitar Player, and other national and international music and industry publications.

Amy was born in Cheltenham, England, grew up in rural Maryland and in Princeton, New Jersey, and has lived in Oakland, California, for over 20 years.

Fall 2010
Nothing like writing for a whole chorus of 40 voices. No looping necessary. Except -- oh -- crap -- I had to go and put sampled toy piano and organ in it, and I'm having trouble arranging the tech to make it easy for the pianist.

Meanwhile, I have been consulting with XXXX (famous microphone company) on a top secret thing that I can't tell you about.

Fall 2008
I have a new thingy that I love. It's called the Blippoo Box (pronounced "blippo"), and it was designed and completely hand-built for me by Rob Hordijk of the Netherlands. Each Blippoo Box is a little different -- mine has a Theremin-like proximity-sensing antenna that applies to either the filter or one of the oscillators. It is really fun to perform with -- small but very dramatic and hand-friendly -- and I especially enjoy the challenge of trying to make it musical, as unlike my normal rig, in which I know exactly what will happen assuming I hit the correct pads, this thing is chaotic; everything is modulating everything, and the resulting sound is crazy and unpredictable. The filter has a speech-like quality to it, so singing along with hand-to-antenna movements that control the filter is almost like a vocal duet.

Fall 2006
In order to cleanly loop the Cello ChiXtet and give each returning loop its own place in the stereo field, I had the choice of either using multiple Echoplexes (each has a mono output) or looking into software. Mobius simulates eight independent stereo Echoplexes, and as I am very attached to the features of the Echoplex I find Mobius works well with my aesthetic. It has a nice visible interface, and it's freeware! Unfortunately it runs on a PC, so in addition to my normal rig, which includes a Mac for hosting samples, I bring a dedicated PC for ChiXtet gigs. Yes, two computers.

The O1X mixer is wonderfully light and very programmable but doesn't have enough busses, so Herb and I spent interminable hair-pulling hours trying to finagle the crazy MLan system to output and return all the instruments, loops, and electronics. It required purchase of an external (and kind of heavy) I88X as output router and interface. So there is way shitloads of shit on stage to do what ought to be fairly simple in concept. Really the only way to do it was send everyone to one of two stereo loops, with the return panning mirroring the send panning, so everyone and her loop has a place in the stereo field. The multiple loopers can be heard simultaneously, so you can crossfade between them. Hence "Dada Exhibit."

Fall 2005
Nothing has changed in regard to my solo rig. A faster computer helps with the latency, but I still use all the hardware in addition, as the computer cannot replace the Proteus sounds. All my solo tunes are performable with the updated rig except for "Stone" which I can sort of fake but always mess up because the O1X does not have a separate cue mix for monitoring differently from what the audience hears. So I can't, for instance, hear my looped rhythm by itself as a guide, and in the busy sections it gets covered up.

Spring 2005
Okay. I am now beginning to use a laptop as an interface for percussion sounds and samples (to eventually replace the Proteus and Alesis). Using Logic as plug-in host for now (hosting Battery), only because I happen to know how to use Logic. Still using the hardware looper. Replacing the giant Pro-1 mixer with the slightly less giant O1X interface/mixer. Slow grueling process plagued with self-doubt and latency issues... Stay tuned.

2003
Much of my music is loop-based; single vocal or instrumental lines are "overdubbed" live on stage to build up a chorus of harmonies and rhythms. In performance I use twelve touch-sensitive drum pads, both to bang out rhythmic accompaniment and to send instructions to my equipment -- to start and stop recording a loop, for instance, or to control effects on my digital mixer. The foot pedals cycle through instrument setups between songs or sections.

My current live equipment includes a DrumKat drum controller, an Echoplex Loop IV, a Yamaha Pro-1 digital mixer, an Emu Proteus synth/sample unit, an Alesis DM-Pro drum synth, and occasionally the ancient but inimitable Roland VP-70 harmonizer/pitch follower.

I'm often asked about my composition process and to what extent the technology dictates the music. I always keep in mind the capabilities of my instruments while composing, but before even approaching the technology I'll usually formulate an entire song in my head -- lyrics, melody, accompanying vocal or instrumental texture, and the function of each drum pad and pedal. I may then spend hours, days or weeks creating samples, programming synth sounds, programming each pad in one or more drum "kits," and choreographing the performance actions (when to hit what pad, etc.). While I'm fascinated by the ever-growing possibilities of music technology and am not indifferent to its coolness factor, my attraction lies primarily in its expressive potential; "Here is what I'd like to say" is more important than "Look what my gadgets can do." In keeping with this more intimate and immediate approach, it is important that on stage I "perform" all aspects of the technology and let the audience see the process, much as any instrumentalist plays an instrument, rather than rely on canned or prerecorded sequences. Why do I not use a laptop? 1) Because they crash; 2) because I like the look of my big stack of gear and all the wires lying around; singing is such an elegant art form, and I enjoy this decidedly inelegant contrast; 3) I feel a laptop gets in the way of a connection with the audience; we see computers as super-smart, inhuman tools with "minds" of their own, so the correlation between my actions and the resulting sounds would seem less organic with a computer intervening; 4) it's much easier for me to see the big lighted displays on my gear than to stare into a busy computer screen. On the other hand, if the perfect interface comes along I may come to my senses; it'd certainly be easier than schlepping all this crap around.