Lea Bertucci // Of Shadow and Substance LP

過去にNNA TapesやUltraviolet Lightなどから発表しているNYの実験音楽家Lea Bertucciが、2023年12月に彼女のプライベートレーベルCibachrome Editionsからリリースしたレコードです。

ストリングス、エレクトロニクス、ハープ、パーカッションによるロングフォームなドローン〜コンテンポラリー2曲を収録。

前作もオススメです。

※デジタル音源をご希望の場合はお気軽にご連絡をお願いいたします

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Ask us for digital files. 12" black vinyl. LP edition of 500. 

Tracklist:

1. Vapours 19:21
2. Of Shadow and Substance 21:17

Text excerpt / artist bio by 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"[...]

[...]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 “vapours” was a pseudo-scientific term to diagnose types of hysteria in women.” The piece was commissioned and performed by Italy’s Quartetto Maurice, who were prompted to visualize vapours in air and to meditate on hysteric fits as they play, while Bertucci controls the sonic space with subtle processing and spatial mixing.

The latter half of the album - just as moving and evocative - comprises the composition “Of Shadow and Substance” for double bass, cello, harp, percussion and electronics commissioned by the Philadelphia creative foundation ARS Nova Workshop and performed by Henry Fraser, Lester St. Louis, Lucia Stravros and Matt Evans. “This piece measures the accumulation of events over glacial periods of time as a metaphor for social and environmental shifts,” Bertucci tells us. “It is a meditation on time travel, asking the listener to consider the way events from the past propel themselves into the future.” Its construction reflects the strange concertina of time we find in recorded history, suspended densely in the moveable center of an empty space. Using experimental mixing techniques, Bertucci loops and layers fragments of the performance in real-time, resulting in a diffuse, swirling, self-referential mass of experience, both familiar and metamorphic.

Lea Bertucci is a New York-based artist, composer and performer whose work describes relationships between acoustic phenomena and biological resonance. In addition to her longstanding practice with woodwind instruments, her work incorporates multichannel speaker arrays, radical methods of free improvisation and creative misuses of audio technology applied to field recording and sampling/collage techniques. Her discography spans over a decade, with eight full-length solo albums and a number of collaborative projects. In 2021 she founded her own imprint, Cibachrome Editions, to focus on releasing her own music. The title "Of Shadow and Substance" is a reference to an episode of cult TV favourite The Twilight Zone."

Artist : Lea Bertucci

Label : Cibachrome Editions