Lea Bertucci - Of Shadow and Substance

The Quietus

The impacts of climate change on music have been visible for some time now. Whether its in discussions of coloured vinyl’s oil consumption, electricity usage for vast farms of streaming servers, or last week’s reports of widespread fainting and the death of a fan at Taylor Swift’s Rio concert, the fact that the Earth’s climate is changing is increasingly difficult to ignore for those involved in either creating or consuming music.

Certainly, for Lea Bertucci, it is a concern. Last heard swapping notes with Lawrence English on this year’s entrancing yet ominous Chthonic and, before that, manipulating vocals with Ben Vida on the experimental Xtended Vox, she might be approaching Of Shadow and Substance with a tweaked sonic palette but the environmental consternations remain steadfast.

Split into two 20 minute halves, Of Shadow and Substance is a work of long-form conviction. Conviction in the cause and conviction in the method. For this release, Bertucci required that her performers (her roles here are that of composer, conductor, and producer) remained within strict just intonation tuning, instilling the entire piece with smooth transitional characteristics. When sustained for these durations the sounds unveil the joy of renewed discovery that long-form pieces facilitate.

‘Vapours’, the opening composition, is a feathery gambit. A dancing path carved with silvery and sonorous strings. What seems disjointed and sporadic reveals a set of contorting threads. A motif blooms and then gently dies out, returning stronger, before ceasing to recur anymore. There’s consummate skill in wrangling the deep bass notes amidst peaking highs, recalling the movement of an ocean’s flow and the mutually beneficial relationship of huge humpback whales and tiny remoras that hitch along for a ride.

Its name purloined from The Twilight Zone, the title track expands the musical spectrum. Grinding strings, chugged bows, glistening percussive swells, cymbal surges, a grazing low end, and wails akin to feedback are all processed and manipulated by Bertucci in real time. Resulting in alien notes suggestive of a great, heaving and breathing technorganic ship piston-squelching itself free of Cronenberg’s latest film set.

Bertucci deals in light and dark. In matter and non-matter. Tenebrous drones and dazzling stabs all gush together like merging seas. And as with seas the sounds surge and withdraw. Abating for sprawling periods before rushing back in like an orchestral tide. And if seas, then space too. Bertucci allows plenty of it after sound-grabbing the aural real estate. Long notes mesh with the silence, fading those glinting crests to nothing.

Much like the aforementioned English collaboration, this concerns itself with disastrous climate change. Bertucci describes it as “a brief glimpse into what it is to be human in what feels like these waning days of the Anthropocene.” This explains further the ‘Vapours’ title. It expresses something of the precariousness of our current global existence and how we appear to be paralysed between states of mind. It also echoes the accusations of hysteria flung at alarm-sounders by those fiscally invested in planetary harm and their faithful attack dogs.

Bertucci might not have the reach of Taylor Swift but, in creating such affecting work, she’s generating a legacy that will hopefully last for as long as there are still humans pacing these receding coast lines.

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A Closer Listen

The anthropocene epoch has become a rich if grim source of inspiration for legions of artists. Defined as the period in which human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet, the epoch began some say in the 1950s, around the time that radioactive fallout was beginning to be detected around the planet, far from the sites where nuclear bombs were being tested.

A terrifying hallmark of the anthropocene is that it stands to be the age in which much of the human race perishes, owing to our heedless reliance on fossil fuels and concomitant embrace of an exploitive consumerist system. To an artist enmeshed in these culturally lethal forces, a conundrum presents itself: What is the value of one’s art and how does one continue making it in the face of such an overwhelming, life-or-death dilemma?

As musician, composer, and visual artist Lea Bertucci has done on her latest album, Of Shadow and Substance, released on her own label, Cibachrome Editions, you do it because you have no other choice. But you also make of your art a kind of activism, one that offers a critique while engaging with the cause of your concern in real time.

Composed of two long-form tracks, OSAS begins with “Vapours,” commissioned by Italy’s Quartetto Maurice. Working with divergent definitions of the title – vapor as a molecule in a liminal state between liquid, gas, or solid; vapour as a sexist medical term that reached its height in the Victorian era to diagnosis women’s “hysteria” – Bertucci prompted the quartet to visualize airborne vapors in transition while also contemplating the misogynistic pseudo-diagnosis.

Playing from a graphically notated score, with Bertucci providing spatial amplification and electronic accompaniment in real time, the Quartetto Maurice (Georgia Privitera, Laura Bertolino, Francesco Vernero, and Aline Privitera) conjure up a keening, pulsing atmosphere of sustained intensity that hovers in roiling, perpetual unrest.

With their instruments (two violins, alto violin, and cello) tuned using just intonation while calling on their deep range of bowing techniques, the quartet explore a broad range of textures, timbres, and harmonies through open string bowing, harmonics, and Bartok pizzicato. While generally minimal in nature if not exactly subdued, the piece erupts just past the halfway mark into a tactile, tuneless frenzy before subsiding and gradually fading away in an ambiguously melancholic drift.

OSAS takes a decidedly different turn with the title track, “Of Shadows and Substance,” commissioned by Philadelphia’s ARS Nova Workshop. Working with double bass, cello, harp, percussion, and electronics, Bertucci, and her fellow musicians Henry Fraser, Lester St. Louis, Lucia Stravros, and Matt Evans begin quietly before quickly crescendoing into a roaring welter of feedback, clattering percussion, and fiercely bowed double bass and cello. This billowing soundcloud throbs and pulses, changing dynamics and dimensions while sustaining itself in a virtuosic display of corrugated textures, squinting strokes, and scalloped tremolos. Bertucci expands the sound palette, instructing her players at times to bow on the metal tailpiece of the cello or insert brass rods between the strings of the double bass to produce richer textures, while proving them with a graphically notated score to which they can improvise. The result is a harsh, churning work that feels both prehistoric and post-apocalyptic.

In her liner notes, Bertucci makes mention of her music hopefully providing “a brief glimpse into what it is to be human in what feels like these waning days of the Anthropocene.” With Of Shadows and Substance, she has created something both deeply personal and darkly universal. (Damian Van Denburgh)