Bertucci, Lea

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...

Bertucci, Lea

A Visible Length Of Light

Cibachrome Editions

***Channeling temperaments of dislocation and wanderlust, filtered through impressions of distinctly American landscapes—coasts, cities, prairie—and the sonic material of everyday experience, defamiliarized by crisis, the New York based composer and multi-instrumentalist, Lea Bertucci, delivers A Visible Length Of Light. Conceived across much of 2020, A Visible Length is the product of real-time reactions to, and reflections upon, the instability of the year, distilled into a series of prescient auditory typographies that shimmer with life and hope. Recorded at Bertucci’s home in New York City and in Omaha, Nebraska, during her residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, A Visible Length Of Light comprises seven condensed works—deploying bass clarinet, alto sax, manipulated tape, organ, a venu wooden flute, and field recordings made in places as wide-ranging as Rio de Janeiro, the California coast, and Dead Horse Bay—surrounded by four “Refrains”—brief, minimal segments that capture Bertucci improvising, via whispers of flute, with the sounds upfolding outside her apartment. Foregoing the long-form compositional approach that has marked her previous albums, it emerges as one of her most pointedly melodic, harmonically rich, and structurally distinct efforts to date. Laced with subtle nods to Bertucci’s long-standing immersion in early 20th century American traditional music (folk, bluegrass, jazz, and gospel), vast washes of spatial ambience, long-tones, pointillistic texture, and delicate interplay, weave an abstract vision of place in the face of displacement—what the composer describes as “the feeling of physically inhabiting a space, when the relationship to that space has become overwhelming, and provokes the...