Lawrence English & Lea Bertucci - Chthonic
A Closer Listen
In 2021, Lawrence English‘s Room40 was our Label of the Year and Lea Bertucci‘s A Visible Length of Light was our #1 album. This year they’ve joined forces on American Dreams. Chthonic is a deep, dark, immersive album, its cover photo perfectly chosen to represent its tectonic theme. The music is densely layered to reflect subterranean pressure, while the largesse of the tone speaks to geologic time and perspective.
Bertucci plays a surprising array of instruments here: cello, viola, flute, lap steel guitar. English contributes field recordings, electronics and tape. Yet even the music imitates field recordings, in the opening piece subterranean rumble joined by stringed creaks and grinds, like a world compressing under enormous pressure and heat. One might posit that the world is indeed experiencing this very phenomenon, both physically and socially, resting on the very lip of chaos. But the beauty of the set is that is served as a tabula rasa for the listener. In the liner notes, Jordan Reyes hears analogies to the crushing emotion of a cancer battle. The opening minutes of “Dust Storm” may stand for any crisis, from the personal to the political, in which the storm has already hit, all markers obscured. The low end of the music deserves efficient sub-woofers; for safety’s sake, this is not a headphone album. By the end, the density has grown oppressive, a sky filled with locusts and bombers, danger above and danger below.
And yet, there is another way to hear the album, despite its darkness. Geologic time is impassive, impervious to the vagaries of human existence. Even the most generous estimates indicate that 99.8% of earth’s existence took place without us, more so if one separates Ardipithecus primates from Homo sapiens. Our time is but a sliver of a sliver. In light of this fact, how might one regard human time, or human problems, more specifically, any individual problem or any sub-par day? When encountering such scales, the experience of awe may lead us in two directions at once: a realization of our own insignificance, coupled with an offsetting gratitude that we exist at all. We view the “Strata” of our lives in years, rather than in eras or eons. The earth operates differently.
English and Bertucci operate within time, yet save for the spaces between tracks, produce a sense of timelessness. The changes within these tracks are incremental, yet great distance is traversed from beginning to end. “Strata” lacks resolution because geology lacks resolution; a human looks at geology and concludes, “this happened, and then that happened.” But tectonic shifts are still – and always – in motion. There are always more strata.
In light of such information and the intensity of the music, will one be comforted or cowed? The response will vary from listener to listener. Reminded that they are not the center of the universe, some listeners may be shaken to the core. Others may find it a religious experience. Either way, English and Bertucci have produced a recording that is larger than life. (Richard Allen)
Thu Aug 03 00:01:50 GMT 2023The Quietus
Field recording can be a solitary discipline, one which requires the artist to fade out mundane distractions and immerse themselves fully in their soundscape of choice. Lawrence English’s catalogue teems with works that feel like the result of such remote journeys. While the Australian composer and Room40 label head was often accompanied and assisted by others in the making of his recordings, usually by his wife Rebecca, 2020’s Field Recordings From The Zone, 2021’s A Mirror Holds The Sky and 2022’s Viento all carry within them varying degrees of isolation, embedded in punishing gusts of wind, rainfall patter, and bushfire chimaera. Every so often, the phenomena get stretched to extremes, making English’s music appear like a vision of an uninhabited Earth several millennia in the future. This sense of desolation carries over to his electronic records, with pristine organic sounds making way for expansive synthetic textures but maintaining a cosmic, timeless scope.
As the all-consuming drone of Merzbow & Vanity Production’s Coastal Erosion and Stephen O’Malley & François J. Bonnet’s slightly airier Cylene teach us, it takes a companion to devise heavy music inspired by the immense, aeons-stretching power of tectonic shifts. Enter New York based composer, sound artist and multi-instrumentalist Lea Bertucci. Like on the excellent Colours Of Air his released earlier this year with Canadian ambient musician Loscil, English lends himself as an attentive listener and generous collaborator on Chthonic. He uses electronics, tapes, and found sound to carve out subterranean spaces for Bertucci to fill with lap steel guitar, cello, viola, and flute phrases. Although the two musicians met in person at the 2019 edition of the Novas Frequencia festival in Rio de Janeiro, circumstances led the collaboration to become remote and unfold slowly and patiently – how else! – over the next couple of years.
A striking conceptual simplicity is at work on each of the five cuts on the album. The combination of their suggestive titles and sonic affects leaves little space for vagueness. Instead, they rely on voluminous textural shapes and repeating motifs to deliver a message of massive impact. On opener ‘Amorphic Foothills’, English’s humming, growling effects start front and centre, but soon subside into the background, while Bertucci’s nervously bowed string reverberations dance in their midst like lava flowing down a cliff, giving the whole piece a restless feel. Likewise, the torrent of static noise and insect-mimicking synthetic chirps of ‘Dust Storm’ and the Laraaji-evoking, metallic microtonal trilling on ‘Geology Of Fire’ conjure the sensation of being trapped in a violent maelstrom or in the midst of a blazing field.
In contrast to these unwavering, vigorous structural movements, ‘A Fissure Exhales’ and ‘Strata’ might appear static, but their inner workings are just as dynamic as those of the earlier cuts if operating on a much larger timescale. Across vast expanses of time and land, nothing but a creaking, haunted set of swings stands in the way of razing winds, while the pressure gradually increases with each of English’s sunken detonations and rusty textures, until finally dispersing under the mercurial, simultaneously calming and agonising whistles of Bertucci’s flute. And as the album ends, the emotions left behind are similarly ambiguous, a combination of eldritch awe and gripping existential terror.
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Wed Aug 16 16:54:55 GMT 2023