***Longstanding figures in New York City experimental music scene—both noted for pushing electroacoustic music into highly individualized realms—Ben Vida and Lea Bertucci began collaborating during the Summer of 2021, while living on opposite sides of the same mountain outside of Woodstock, NY. What began as a series of conversations between friends, slowly formed into the development of a unique form of nonhierarchical improvisation that challenged and rethought the nature of dialog and language itself; intertwining their respective practices into a series of fluid compositions where the identities and locations of each artist become progressively obscure. Issued by Bertucci’s Cibachrome Editions, Murmurations is the first culmination of this process. Comprising six instrumental works, as well as four that place both artists’ long-standing engagement with the human voice, the album presents a fascinating, uncharted position between the efforts of experimental vocalists like Joan La Barbara, Katalin Ladik, Jeanne Lee, and Linda Sharrock, musique concrète, sound poetry, free improvisation, and electroacoustic music; abstractions and deconstructions of language that form an ecosystem unto themselves.
LP $23.75
07/22/2022
***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...
LP $18.95
05/21/2021