Photo: PWR

Composer, artist and Room40 founder Lawrence English and interdisciplinary artist, composer and improviser Lea Bertucci are both prolific and gifted experimentalists. The pair met at a festival in Rio de Janeiro in 2019 and began to collaborate remotely, with the onset of the pandemic in 2020. A debut collaborative album titled Chthonic is now on the way. English has shared his thoughts about their collaboration:

“Lea and I met in Rio de Janeiro, we had both been invited to perform a special set of field recordings and site-specific sound on a small island in the middle of one of Rio’s larger public parks. I was very struck by Lea’s approaches to sound, specifically to her ways of contrasting particular qualities in sound she had collected across the city during her residency. Our billing together there seemed like a natural fit and I am positive some of the earliest ideas for a possible recording started there. Throughout the course of our long-distance exchange, I found myself always digging deeper into the sound world we were creating. It was a sense of excavation, seeking things that just sat underneath the first impression of the sounds. Between that and our conversations around sound pressure and density, I think this record took on a form of its own very quickly.”

Chthonic will see the light of day on August 11th through American Dreams and we can already get a bewildering taster of it with the first single ‘Geology of Fire’. Take a listen below.