Laurie Amat, improvisational vocalist, composer and teacher, has been exploring the vast possibilities of human sound, focusing on the power of pure voice, breath and the body as an instrument to convey a direct expression of visceral human emotions and individual story; and in various musics including pop, punk, classical lyric and opera works.

Ms. Amat is a resident artist at AS220. She is a core member of the Tenderloin Opera Company at the Mathewson Church along with collaborators Erik Ehn, Kirsten Volness and Jacob Richman and a recurring performer in the Luna Loba/Wolf Moon series curated by Shey Rivera. Her long range primary upcoming project is the premiere production of The Y2K16 International Live Looping Festival (PVD Loop), a 3 day festival hosting 30 international, U.S. and local Live Loopers at AS220. Her solo projects include “Urban Cathedrals” – international live performance, sound recording and multimedia installation in resonant spaces; and the development of her multimedia performance piece, “Ballast-A Study in the Stress of Memory and Survival”, the experience of a lone survivor of an airplane crash, also with collaborator Shey Rivera.
 

She performs and records site-specific architectural sound pieces in alternative settings such as cisterns, bunkers, concrete overpasses and abandoned factories; and special venues including the Museo di Santa Giulia (Brescia, IT); Klášter Plasy (Plasy, CR); The Silo at Bergen Arkitekthøgskulen (Bergen, NO); DeYoung Museum (SF, CA); The Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago and The Peabody Conservatory (Baltimore, MD).

Ms. Amat also continues to break even more boundaries with her use of electronics, creating voice based angelic choirs and brutal industrial sound pieces.

Her reputation for her fearless and exploratory approach to sound and performance has allowed her to expand beyond solo voice into major collaborations with many equally adventurous partnerships such as her longtime partnership with computer music pioneer Max Mathews with whom she worked at CCRMA Stanford from 1995 on established tech such as the Radio Baton, and his experimental Tunable Phaser Filter System upon which they collaborated until his death in 2011. Other collaborators also include Avant-Garde legends The Residents (San Francisco, CA); Sonisk Blodbad (Bergen, NO); Flos (Brescia, IT); Deutsche Nepal (Sjövik, SE); Timeghost-Adam Morosky (Providence, RI).