New York composer Lea Bertucci made her name as an unorthodox saxophonist – some of her most compelling performances see her playing alto sax or bass clarinet, using assorted looper pedals and tape effects to create improvisations that are pitched somewhere between the hypnotic drone music of La Monte Young and the ecstatic free jazz of Evan Parker. But her most adventurous work fits into the rather nebulous category of “sound artist”.
For several years, she has been exploring the acoustics of unusual venues, including an underground lake in upstate New York, a nuclear plant in Stockholm and a former military base in Paris. Instead of describing her work as “site-specific” (which implies that a listener needs to be present for it to work) Bertucci prefers “site-responsive”, tapping into each space’s unique acoustic properties. She starts by establishing the “room tone” – the point at which the space resonates – and uses that as the harmonic basis for what she plays.
Acoustic Shadows is her most ambitious “site-responsive” piece yet, a veritable piece of civil engineering, composed, as she says, “in four dimensions”. It was assembled from recordings made in a 440-metre space under the Deutzer Brücke bridge in Cologne, with assorted musicians playing in different parts of the concrete vault (each observing rigorous social distancing). There are two lengthy tracks – Brass features a series of saxophone drones that are interrupted by dissonant interjections on trumpet and trombone; Percussion starts with minimal patterns played on wood blocks, segues into rolling timpani and ends with a series of disconnected tuned percussion instruments. But the dominant instrument here is the venue: you can hear the amplified movements and breaths of each musician, the rumbling of trains overhead, the cavernous reverb that makes each sound take an eternity to decay. Listened to at high volume it becomes quite mesmeric.
Also out this month
Arizona’s Sir Richard Bishop has worked with dozens of alt-rock outfits over the years but his solo work sees him playing acoustic guitar instrumentals. Oneiric Formulary (Drag City) features touches of bossa nova and flamenco but his default setting is an austere, baroque minimalism, haunted by the ghosts of Davey Graham and Bert Jansch.
Life Without Machines (Flau Records) sees pianist Melaine Dalibert playing 15 pieces by French composer Sylvain Chauveau – each, apparently, based on a Barnett Newman painting and inspired by environmental concerns. The pieces are often quite comically simple – the kind of thing that could be played by a small child, or a cat stepping across a keyboard. But the sparseness can be devastatingly effective: like a series of fragments from a Conlon Nancarrow piece, slowed down and transformed into hypnotic minimalism.
Gary Husband is possibly best known for his tenure as drummer with Level 42, but he’s proved himself one of Britain’s most inventive post-bop pianists in an impressive variety of contexts. His latest collaboration Music of Our Times (MoonJune Records) sees German electronicist Markus Reuter providing ambient washes on guitar while Husband lurches from Satie-esque meditations to modal freakouts.
