NEW YORK’S Lea Bertucci is a composer and sound artist who first picked up a sax at the tender age of 9, going to learn the disciplines of the instrument in classical and jazz before, always hungry for the news, starting to explore more abstract musical forms in her late teens.
With roundabout a dozen albums now under her belt for labels such as NNA Tapes, Astral Spirits and Obsolete Units, she’s set to release her latest album of drone bliss and freer woodwind and blown melodies, A Visible Length Of Light, on Cibachrome Editions in the middle of next month.
And today and right here you can hear a track from that, the meditative “An Arc Of The Horizon”: longform tones with an almost maritime, squeezebox feel, static waves of percussion and more graceful trilling that brings to mind unfairly overlooked 4AD act Dif Juz.
Conceived throughout 2020, A Visible Length presents as a diary of reactions to and reflections upon a hellishly unstable year, recorded both at Lea’s home in the Big Apple and in Omaha, Nebraska, during her an artist’s residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art,
It comprises seven fully formed pieces for bass clarinet, alto sax, manipulated tape, organ, wooden flute, and field recordings made in places as fair apart as Rio de Janeiro, the Californian coast, and Dead Horse Bay; and four refrains – brief, minimal segments of improvisation.
You’ll find therein washes of spatial ambience, longform tones and pointillistic texture, which Lea summates as “the feeling of physically inhabiting a space when the relationship to that space has become overwhelming, and provokes the desire to seek truth, transcendence, and moments of comfort, disquiet and catharsis through confusion.”
Lea Bertucci’s A Visible Length Of Light will be released on Cibachrome Editions digitally, on CD and on vinyl on April 16th; there’s an extremely limited vinyl and ‘infinite loop’ cassette edition, too. It’s available to order now over at Bandcamp.
Connect with Lea at her website.
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