Amy X Neuburg

Really Long Bio
Last updated fall 2008
[This is for imformational purposes. If you need a shorter bio for print or publicity, please contact Amy.]

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

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

Amy is best known for her live solo performances, in which she uses a MIDI drum kit, a real-time looping machine, and an array of sounds and samples to construct complex, meticulously crafted songs and stories one layer at a time. (See Tek Tawk below for more info.) She has performed throughout the U.S. 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), New York venues (including Roulette, Joe's Pub, Bang on a Can at Symphony Space), the Milwaukee Art Museum, 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. Her current project The Secret Language of Subways -- a 13-song cycle for voice, three cellos, looping and electronic percussion -- will be released on CD in spring 2009. She has received commissions from Santa Cruz New Music Works, Present Music (Milwaukee), the Robin Cox Ensemble (LA), the San Francisco Jewish Music Festival -- for a song cycle for seven looped vocalists -- and the Christchurch Arts Centre (New Zealand) for a site-specific theater piece for wandering chorus.

A classically trained singer, Amy has been featured in numerous contemporary works and recordings. She toured the U.S., 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 long-running musical 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. Recent vocal performances include a recital of Marc Blitzstein songs (with tenor John Duykers) at Other Minds' Blitzstein Centennial, and a concert of songs and short operas by New York composer Jeffrey Lependorf.

Amy has composed extensively for dance and visual media. Her dance composing and sound-design credits include work with AXIS, Sonya Delwaide, Joe Goode, Nina Haft, Thaļs Mazur, Claudine Naganuma, ODC, Randee Paufve, 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 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 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 staged socially relevant guerilla street theater. As a general partner of IS Productions Amy has co-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, 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, Zellerbach, SF Friends of Chamber Music, 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.

Her 2004 CD Residue is on Other Minds Records; three previous CDs are on the Racer label.

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.

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 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 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 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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.