Lea Bertucci is not only amazingly versatile, but also impressively prolific. A timely review of her recent work in the form of this double LP thus seems only appropriate: »Metal Aether« was originally released in 2018, »Resonant Field« the following year on NNA Tapes. The two sold-out albums are now brought together in one release, or rather contrasted with each other. For on the first of the two albums, her performance on the alto saxophone is in the foreground, while the tape rustles. The four pieces move between minimalist composition and dissolute improvisation, a field of tension in which Bertucci sometimes gives herself away on her instrument and layers her own playing on top of it (»Patterns for Alto«) or designs demanding atonal sound collages that combine almost jazzy solos with noise (»Accumulations«). The four pieces on »Resonant Fields«, on the other hand, move at the interface of site-specific sound art and active deep listening in the sense of a Pauline Oliveros. But Bertucci didn’t descend into a cistern for this and instead filled the imposing Marine A Grain Elevator in the so-called Silo City in Buffalo, New York with music: a huge storage tank with a twelve-second resonance time. Bertucci works noticeably with this spatial reverb. Here she seems to open up the sound space with short phrases (»Wind Piece«), there she fills it with tense, layered, sustained tones (»Warp and Weft«). On the second side of this second LP, the sound becomes more abstract again, moving away from the physical and thus all the more from »Metal Aether«. Thus juxtaposed, this double reissue reveals two extremes of a composer and musician who unites many more within her multifaceted practice.
Lawrence English & Lea Bertucci
Chthonic
American Dreams