Lea Bertucci - Resonant Field
The Free Jazz Collective 80
By Nick Ostrum
Lea Bertucci, the young sound-sculptor and saxophonist based in New York, has seen her popularity explode over the years, at least as much as one could expect for someone working on the droning fringes where experimental jazz and soundscapes meet. Her recent output has been favorably regarded both on FJB (brief reviews here and here) and beyond it. This very album, in fact, has recently listed as one of the top 10 jazz albums of 2019 by the New York Times. And, for good reason.
Resonant Field is a partially solo effort (though with some help from Robbie Lee, James Ilgenfritz, and the Tigue percussion collective) recorded in an abandoned grain elevator in Silo City, Buffalo during the summer of 2017. The building is as much an instrument as it is a locale. Even more than other site-specific projects such as that capture in The Cave (Larry Ochs and Gerald Cleaver) or even a lot of Deep Listening work, this album is not simply about tracking an echo, or experiment with timbres in unique spaces. Instead, this album is about projecting sounds, and layering tone upon resonance in entrancing sonic loops. It is also so much more than that.
It is an exploration of polyphony and the reflexivity of sound and space. It plays with ideas of note creation and deterioration that conceptually resemble Nate Wooley’s Syllables project but focus less on the process of generating a note than on the ways those notes are warped, yet sustained as they circulate and interact with the silo. In the process, she creates not only oddly synthetic sounding ambiance (the mixing process certainly adds to this), but also a natural, almost primordial feeling of space and solitude that stretches time in the same way Bertucci piles and manipulates microtones. She plays the room as much as she plays her sax.
It is this combination of physicality (the silo, the acoustic instrumentation, the echoes and reverberation) and numinous atmospherics that makes it so compelling and perplexing. I am hesitant to read too much socio-religious theory into this, but I cannot shake the idea that Mircea Eliade’s concept of the eternal return - the repetition of rites and practices that allows one to step back into mythic-historical time, however briefly – provides an entrepot to unlocking this album. Resonant Field quite consciously involves the return to a time and place that had been lost to progress and, in its imagined state, is already becoming a quasi-mythic memory. It involves ritualized performance that bends perceptions of time and transports the listener to this reimagined and reinvented space, the contours of which are mapped and determined by a performance meant to realize the hitherto forgotten – or maybe now simply newly envisioned - potentialities of the environment. There is an element of communion with an imagined past, here. The silo never could have sounded like this when it was active. It never could have sounded like this had it not been left to decay. It never could have sounded like this in any other time or in any other interaction. And Resonant Field never could have sounded like this in any other place.
Resonant Field is available on vinyl and as a download:
Tiny Mix Tapes 70
Lea Bertucci
Resonant Field
[NNA Tapes; 2019]
Rating: 3.5/5
Resonant Field is apocalyptic. It teems with the whispers of the coming storm, fears of the unknown in the face of unparalleled terror, as the Earth probes ever deeper into how it can rid itself of the disease known as humanity. The saxophone has rarely been used as a conduit by which artists craft a portrait of the coming plagues, but it is Lea Bertucci’s compositional acumen that propels the instrument from a mere tool into a vessel of sheer resonance.
Her biography details her as a “sound artist whose work bridges performance, installation, and multichannel activations of acoustic space.” On Resonant Field, this idea is amplified by the choice of recording location. Silo City, a grain elevator complex in Buffalo, sits as the monolith by which Bertucci activates the contrast of space and place, combining her alto saxophone with the cavernous metallurgy. It’s a situation where the work can’t be separated from its original habitat.
Resonant Field by Lea Bertucci
What comprises Resonant Field takes place both on our Earthly plane and in a metaphysical area, not beholden to normal rules. The focus here is, of course, on spatial awareness, yet there remains an eerie sense of unbeing, suited for an intuition that the universe wants Bertucci to be playing these exact notes, at this exact location. It is simultaneously chaotic and controlled, a production trying to be unbounded, straining against its masters while causing endless friction.
Unlike her previous release Metal Aether, Resonant Field is much less fevered, unclustered musically. Bertucci lets the playing and its atmospheres speak for themselves, and it results in an arresting listen. The compositions transition and grow with you, a testament to how Bertucci utilizes the temporality of what is being played and what it can conjure in both musician and listener. By this method, Resonant Field is endless.
Tiny Mix Tapes 70
Lea Bertucci
Resonant Field
[NNA Tapes; 2019]
Rating: 3.5/5
Resonant Field is apocalyptic. It teems with the whispers of the coming storm, fears of the unknown in the face of unparalleled terror, as the Earth probes ever deeper into how it can rid itself of the disease known as humanity. The saxophone has rarely been used as a conduit by which artists craft a portrait of the coming plagues, but it is Lea Bertucci’s compositional acumen that propels the instrument from a mere tool into a vessel of sheer resonance.
Her biography details her as a “sound artist whose work bridges performance, installation, and multichannel activations of acoustic space.” On Resonant Field, this idea is amplified by the choice of recording location. Silo City, a grain elevator complex in Buffalo, sits as the monolith by which Bertucci activates the contrast of space and place, combining her alto saxophone with the cavernous metallurgy. It’s a situation where the work can’t be separated from its original habitat.
Resonant Field by Lea Bertucci
What comprises Resonant Field takes place both on our Earthly plane and in a metaphysical area, not beholden to normal rules. The focus here is, of course, on spatial awareness, yet there remains an eerie sense of unbeing, suited for an intuition that the universe wants Bertucci to be playing these exact notes, at this exact location. It is simultaneously chaotic and controlled, a production trying to be unbounded, straining against its masters while causing endless friction.
Unlike her previous release Metal Aether, Resonant Field is much less fevered, unclustered musically. Bertucci lets the playing and its atmospheres speak for themselves, and it results in an arresting listen. The compositions transition and grow with you, a testament to how Bertucci utilizes the temporality of what is being played and what it can conjure in both musician and listener. By this method, Resonant Field is endless.