Solo Music
Woodwinds, voice, tape, electronics. Somewhere between, drone, free improvisation, minimalism, noise. Always spectral, dynamic and weird as hell.
“Very boss” – Byron Coley, The Wire Magazine
“Noise that is untethered and limitless” – Jenn Pelly, Pitchfork
“Bertucci… mines the kaleidoscopic possibilities of the sax” – Marc Masters, NPR
“I can imagine assembling legos to that” - Tom Waits, BBC6
My interpretation of Robert Ashley’s The Wolfman. Performed in the bathroom at Wesleyan University’s World Music Hall in 2024. Cinematography by Calla Palenczy.
Performance at Borderline Festival, Athens Greece, 2021
Performance at LUFF Festival, Lausanne Switzerland, 2018
Performance at Radio France Concert Hall, Paris. 2022.
Performance with tape/voice at Soundtoys HQ, Burlington Vermont, 2022
Performance video shot at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE for Metropolis Ensemble’s House Music Series, 2020
The Oracle
2025
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 manipulates field recordings to place the listener somewhere deep within the sphere of imagination. She describes “a seething natural world and foreboding visions of the long arc of civilization” that are revealed through improvisational vocal polyphony layered until it forms dissonant choirs. The Oracle dares the listener to find beauty amongst the wreckage.
A Visible Length of Light
Channelling 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.
