New York-based composer, performer and sound designer Lea Bertucci has announced details of a new album. Entitled Acoustic Shadows, it started as an event inside a hollow bridge in Cologne, Germany, as Bertucci explains:

“Acoustic Shadows I-III was a series of site-specific musical performances and a sound installation that took place in the enclosed hollow body of the Deutzer bridge in Koln, Germany, 2018. Spanning approximately 440 meters across the Rhine river, the extraordinary acoustics and rich existing aural architecture of this site became crucial components of the installation and musical compositions.

An 8-channel speaker system distributed throughout the bridge became activated by three instrumental performances that happened throughout the course of a week. Fragments of each performance were captured by microphones installed in the space and then played back through the 8-channels after the performance was over in a loop of overlapping moments, creating a sonic accumulation that takes place over long stretches of time – a musical performance with no clear ending.”

Bertucci also gave some insight into the recording process:

“Rather than offer a straight document of a piece that eschewed notions of time, space and subjective/mutable spatial positioning of the listeners, I was more interested in shaping compositions that worked within the parameters of an LP, developing pieces that worked within the approximate timeframe of 20 minutes on each side and capturing the essence of the experience. The original pieces were more than 40 minutes long each, and with no real ending due to the playback element that transformed performance into installation.”

Acoustic Shadows arrives on April 15th through SA Recordings but we can already ear an excerpt of its first piece, ‘Brass’.