Amy X Neuburg

BIO
[Last updated fall 2006]

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

Amy X Neuburg is best known for her wildly entertaining "avant-cabaret" performances for voice and live electronics, in which she uses an electronic drumset, a real-time looping machine, and an array of sounds and samples to construct complex, emotionally intense songs and stories. In live performance she uses the looper to build up thick vocal harmonies and rhythms one layer at a time, and controls all loops and samples by hitting drum pads, stomping on foot pedals, and grabbing faders; there are no canned or pre-recorded tracks. (See Technology below for more info.) Amy's songs are diversely influenced and sung in various styles -- from rock to bel canto to avant-garde -- over a nearly four-octave vocal range.

A resident of Oakland, California, Amy has performed at clubs, theaters, festivals, schools and museums nationally and internationally, with frequent appearances in the Bay Area and New York. Highlights include the Other Minds Festival (Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco), the Berlin International Poetry Festival, arts festivals and universities throughout New Zealand, New York venues (Bang on a Can Marathon at Symphony Space, Roulette, Joe's Pub, etc.), the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Chicago Arts Club, and college residencies and electronic music festivals throughout the U.S. She has also staged her own multimedia one-woman music-theater show Songs About Life & Death & Love & Insects at EXIT Theatre in SF.

Recently Amy has been expanding her looping experimentations to include chamber ensembles. She has received commissions from Present Music (Milwaukee) to compose for voice and ensemble with live looping of all the instruments, the San Francisco Jewish Music Festival for a song cycle for seven looped vocalists, the Christchurch Arts Centre (New Zealand) for a site-specific work for 15 "traveling" vocalists, and Santa Cruz New Music Works for chamber ensemble with looped voice and flute, among others. Her current project is an evening-length song cycle for voice, three cellos, live looping and electronic percussion (to premiere December 2006, San Francisco).

A classically trained singer, Amy has been featured in numerous contemporary works and recordings. She toured the U.S., Europe and Japan with Robert Ashley's opera ensemble, performing in three operas from his Now Eleanor series, and sang on the Nonesuch recording of Ashley's Improvement. She also sang and drummed with Culture Clash in their long-running musical comedy The Birds 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 vocal performances include a recital of Marc Blitzstein songs (with tenor John Duykers) at Other Minds' Blitzstein centennial concert (Yerba Buena, SF), and a recent concert of songs and short operas by New York composer Jeffrey Lependorf.

For modern dance, Amy's composing and sound-designing credits include work with AXIS Dance Company, Sonya Delwaide, Joe Goode, Nina Haft, Thaïs Mazur, Claudine Naganuma, ODC, Randee Paufve, Terry Sendgraff and Ellen Webb. Often Amy performs on stage with the dancers, creating live electronic and vocal scores. In other media, Amy has composed for filmmakers Owen Land, Lynn Hershman, Andrew Silver and Searchlight Films, as well as for local theater productions and for interactive installations by Xerox/PARC researchers (most notably Nightfall at Yerba Buena Center). In 2000 and 2001 Amy was ongoing composer for Mondomedia's popular 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 occasionally annual Irish April Fool's Passover. Before that she was a core member of the experimental music-theater ensemble MAP, with whom she co-wrote and performed in the one-act musicals Walk Out and The Point, played in clubs, and staged socially relevant guerilla street theater.

Amy is a general partner of IS Productions, with whom she has produced numerous experimental music and theater events, including the 2002 Electric Words festival (with the SFEMF), and large-scale theater performances by MAP and Amy X Neuburg & Men.

Amy received undergraduate degrees from Oberlin Conservatory (Voice) and Oberlin College (Linguistics), and an M.F.A. in Electronic Music from the Mills College CCM. Awards and honors include Phi Beta Kappa, Pi Kappa Lambda, Oberlin Conservatory Honors, the Wieland Prize for Vocal Excellence; residencies with Music Omi, Nautilus Composers & Playwrights, Djerassi Resident Artists, and the Arts Centre of Christchurch (New Zealand); and grants from Arts International, the US Embassy New Zealand, Meet the Composer, the East Bay Community Fund, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. 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.

Her most recent CD Residue (2004) is on Other Minds records. Three previous CDs were released on the Racer label.

Much of my music is loop-based; single vocal lines are "overdubbed" to build up a chorus of harmonies. 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 can function similarly or can change instrument set-ups 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 entering the studio 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 approach, it is important that on stage I "perform" the technology and let the audience see the process, rather than rely on pre-recorded 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 more cerebral and 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.

[Note added March 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. 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.]