Lea Bertucci is many things – composer, saxophonist, bass clarinettist, electronicist, and performer of unique site-specific pieces. She’s probably best known as a leading light in downtown New York’s noise scene, making discordant, drone-based music that explores unusual textures and timbres. Part of her aim, she says, is to reimagine classical music from a noise musician’s perspective: using orthodox instruments to create textures that sound eerie and discomfiting by applying electronic processing and extended techniques (overblowing, unorthodox fingering, distortion) Of Shadow and Substance is the best example of this approach: the Italian string outfit Quartetto Maurice create unearthly sounds using cellos, double basses, harps and percussion, with Bertucci providing spatial mixing and adding digital effects.
There are two lengthy tracks – the first is the 19-minute Vapours, where fidgety strings scratch and groan like a rusty car door, outlining a perfect fifth alongside dense clusters of notes that become purer as the track continues. More disturbing is the 21-minute title track. The double basses saw away with intensity; the cellos play shivery tremolo effects that sound like a helicopter taking off; cymbals splash furiously in the background. You would never describe this as jazz, but it seems to ebb and flow like an ecstatic Pharoah Sanders-style freak out.
In her sleevenotes, Bertucci says this work doesn’t sound like something she created. “It provides a brief glimpse into what it is to be human in what feels like these waning days of the Anthropocene,” she writes. In this sense it is a companion piece to Bertucci’s last album, Chthonic, released six months ago – a collaboration recorded remotely under lockdown with Australian musician Lawrence English based around the Earth’s geology. Where Chthonic used electronic drones and recordings of nature to sonically evoke earthquakes, volcanoes and shifting tectonic plates, Of Shadow and Substance does something similar using acoustic instruments. It is a slow-burning piece that encourages us to view time in geological rather than human terms – the rapturous, otherworldly sounds that the planet might continue to make long after humanity’s extinction.
Also out this month
Musique Infinie are a Swiss duo comprising composer and sound artist Noémi Büchi and sound designer Feldermelder. Their new album I (Kudos Records) is a pulsating piece of drone-based electronica that shimmers and throbs beautifully, with a hint of implied violence. Thomas Bartlett, AKA Doveman, is best known as part of The Gloaming and as a collaborator with the likes of Sufjan Stevens, Norah Jones, St Vincent and Florence Welch. But his first solo LP, Standards Vol 1 (BMG), sees him playing very straight, stripped-back versions of standards and showtunes on a clunky upright piano, reminiscent of the fragile beauty of Keith Jarrett’s The Melody at Night With You. Dave Wilson is a jazz saxophonist and academic from New Zealand, but his latest album Ephemeral (Thelonious Records) moves way beyond hard bop. Using a string section and piano/bass/drums trio, he creates unsettling, dissonant and quite spiritually intense music that draws inspiration from the sounds of nature.
• This review was amended on 5 January 2024 to correct the instrument that Dave Wilson plays.
