Photo: Colin Conces

Following last year’s Acoustic Shadows, Lea Bertucci is gearing up to release a new album this Spring. Entitled A Visible Length Of Light, the album features field recordings made in places like Rio de Janeiro, the California coast, and Dead Horse Bay and saw the New York-based composer, performer and sound designer use a number of instruments, including bass clarinet, alto sax, manipulated tape, organ and a venu wooden flute.
According to the press release, A Visible Length Of Light “channel[s] 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 album marks the relaunch of Bertucci’s own Cibachrome Editions and it promises to be “one of her most pointedly melodic, harmonically rich, and structurally distinct efforts to date.”

‘On Opposite Sides of Sleep’ serves as the first taste from the album and is offered with an accompanying film by Fern Silva. Here it is.

A Visible Length Of Light is out on April 16th through Cibachrome Editions.

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’.