• Elma Mayer

Elma Mayer was born in Bucharest, Romania. Her family emigrated, and eventually landed in southern California when she was eight years old. Elma grew up steeped in diasporific European/Jewish modernist culture, with Berg's Wozzeck as background music. This was, however, tempered by hundreds of visits to Disneyland in states of higher consciousness.

In 1978, Elma attended the Conservatoire de Musique in Grenoble, France, taking courses in electronic music and musique concrete.

In 1980, as a student of new music at the University of California, San Diego, she met her future husband Brian Woodbury. Together, they founded Some Philharmonic, an art-pop band which counts more than 30 musicians as alumni. The band released an LP in 1983.

At UCSD, Elma studied composition with Robert Erickson, and Pulitzer Prize-winning composers Bernard Rands and Roger Reynolds. But the most useful piece of knowledge that Elma gleaned was how to coil a mic cable properly. (You have to give it a little twist on each loop - that way it becomes much easier to control.) She earned her M.A. in 1982.

A 1985 solo piece, My First Kazoo, for tape-manipulated voice, appears on the compilation LP "A Beginner's Guide to C.O.M.A" (1985, California Outside Music Association/Rotary Totem Records).

Elma and Brian moved to New York's Lower East Side in 1986, then to Brooklyn. Elma began performing solo, at Heather Woodbury's Cafe Bustelo, the Knitting Factory, Dance Theatre Workshop, and Dixon Place. She also appeared as a guest vocalist on They Might Be Giants "Apollo 18." She played keyboards and sang background vocals with Brian Woodbury’s Popular Music Group, and the trio Same Boat Songs, and collaborated with Frank London on a musical.

Elma and Brian's daughter Juniper was born in 1995, and their son Moss joined the noisy clamor in 1999.

In 1996, Elma released a self-titled CD on Ponk Records. In 2001, the family moved to Silver Lake (Los Angeles), where she is at work on another CD of art-pop songs, as well as a chamber opera entitled "The Art of the Loop."