Bertucci, Lea

Bertucci, Lea

The Oracle

Cibachrome Editions

***Acclaimed New York-based composer Lea Bertucci offers The Oracle, a striking, vocal-focused collection of music that spans six tracks of adventurous sounds steeped in mysticism and imagination, over three years in the making. Her first purely solo endeavor since 2021’s much lauded A Visible Length of Light (Cibachrome Editions), The Oracle breaks new ground within the scope of Bertucci’s singular voice as an artist.The Oracle is an alchemy of contemporary political anxieties illuminated by surrealistic images that seep in from the unconscious. The music centers on voice, a shift from the instrumental music of previous albums. Bertucci’s creatively misuses a reel-to-to-reel tape machine to live-manipulate her voice, a process that breaks apart language to instill meaning beyond the word. The lyrics that populate The Oracle originate from what the artist calls a “stream-of-unconsciousness” method of improvisation. She continues, “fragments of words and phrases simmer within layers of voice . . . revealing and obscuring images of dreams, warped news headlines and mythological imagery.” These subliminal influences collide to create a “soothsaying for this tumultuous historical moment”.A hushed disquiet haunts The Oracle and evokes the ancient, eternal, and quotidian all at once. In the opening track, "Oracular Chasm," a clarion call of folkloric flutes resonates in a cave in upstate New York following a rainstorm. A master of exploring the phenomena of hyper-resonant space, as in 2019’s Resonant Field (NNA Tapes) and 2020’s Acoustic Shadows (SA Recordings), Bertucci again summons the totality of sounding objects in conjunction with extraordinary acoustic conditions.Throughout,...

Bertucci, Lea

Of Shadow and Substance

Cibachrome Editions

***Acclaimed NYC experimental musician Lea Bertucci explores dissonance, drone and dynamics with two new longform compositions for strings, electronics, harp and percussion on Of Shadow and Substance. “More so than any of my other music, I don’t feel that these works belong to me,” Bertucci writes. “There is something about them that is beyond myself as an individual and provides, if anything, a brief glimpse into what it is to be human in what feels like these waning days of the Anthropocene.” Working with instrumentation in the ancient “just intonation” tuning structure (in which notes are spaced exclusively at whole-number ratios of frequencies) and a textural approach to composition, even commonly-heard timbres such as cello, harp and double bass in Of Shadow and Substance are afforded a sense of deep, ancestral knowing. The record opens with “Vapours”, whose contemplative, semi-improvisational, interflowing lines of acoustic instrumentation swell and expand like the passage of time, as if revealing an ancient, eternal memory, old as humanity itself. Its spacious, mutable open strings and droning harmonies do not favour a soloist or even any single melody, but instead blur and coalesce into one entity, drifting from consonance to discordance in harmonic clusters. A dizzying middle section gives rise to a sense of panic, pulling the strands of languid, drifting vapours into a volatile tumult before resettling into a misty, atmospheric trance-state. Bertucci writes: “A “vapor” is a molecule that exists on the verge between a liquid, gaseous or solid state, and the archaic term...