Earlier this month, composer, artist and Room40 founder Lawrence English and interdisciplinary artist, composer and improviser Lea Bertucci announced the release of their debut collaborative album, Chthonic. Following the bewildering first single, ‘Geology of Fire’, the pair have let loose a second track from the album called ‘Amorphic Foothills’. Give it a listen now and grab the album when it’s out on August 11th through American Dreams.
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.
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Photo of Robbie Lee by Anna Webber, photo of Lea Bertucci by Daniel Melfi
After enchanting us with the celestial ‘Glitter and Gleam’, Robbie Lee & Lea Bertucci have shared the staggering ‘Division Music’, the second single from their upcoming collaborative album Winds Bells Falls. On the new track, Lee plays a gemshorn, a medieval wind instrument, similar to a small ocarina, traditionally made from the horn of a cow or other animals. He comments:
“Division Music quickly turns into a buzzing swarm, but instead of becoming claustrophobic, it’s lightened up by the little gemshorn. It might have been a medieval shepherd’s instrument, but here it’s inherently funny sounding. Multiplied by the tape machine, it makes a huge racket for something so small. This is serious music, but we can smile while playing it. To me this track is like an adventure dream, and the gemshorn is some little animal guide, safely getting you through it.”
Listen to ‘Division Music’ below and grab the album when it’s out on February 18th through Telegraph Harp.
Photo: Amy Mills
Winds Bells Falls is the new collaborative album from two utterly brilliant musicans with an eagerness to develop and explore new avenues of work, Robbie Lee and Lea Bertucci. Both based out of New York, Lee is an improviser and sound creator known for performing on a plethora of unconventional instruments, and Bertucci is an interdisciplinary artist, composer and improviser whose work spans through installation, sound, and video.
A match made in heaven, Lee and Bertucci recorded their first session in 2019 during her artist residency at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works and continued recording at his studio. As the press release explains, on the album Lee “plays medieval and baroque woodwinds, celeste (bell keyboard), and tubular chimes, while Bertucci live-manipulates and mangles his playing, hands inside a reel-to-reel tape machine, transforming and regurgitating in real time.”
Winds Bells Falls will see the light of day on February 18th through Telegraph Harp and they have already unveiled the celestial opening track, ‘Glitter and Gleam’. Speaking about the track, Lee comments:
“What I love about Glitter and Gleam is this combination of the most magical sparkly dreamfolk palette that gets utterly destroyed by how Lea uses the tape machines. Because the celeste has no control over the sound after the note is played, the feeling of dialogue is really clear in this one — you can hear what Lea is doing to the notes I play, and then hear how I’m responding back. It makes an infinite feedback loop of listening and reacting. Even though the vibe is very mellow, the energy is quietly all charged up.”
Listen to ‘Glitter and Gleam’ below and be enchanted like we were.
Photo:West Den Haag
Lea Bertucci has a new album on the way, A Visible Length Of Light, and she had already unveiled the lead single ‘On Opposite Sides of Sleep. Ahead of the album release on April 16th through her own Cibachrome Editions, Bertucci has shared a new track called ‘An Arc of the Horizon’. Take a listen below.