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Lea Bertucci, “The Oracle” (Cibachrome Editions, 2025)

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This latest release from the New York-based composer saxophonist is a bold and deeply psychedelic departure from her usual terrain (aside from being partially recorded in a cave, of course). The first big surprise is that The Oracle is an extremely vocal-centric album to an almost a capella degree. The other major twist is that Bertucci “creatively misuses a reel-to-to-reel tape machine to live-manipulate her voice” into an unpredictably kaleidoscopic and hallucinatory swirl of bubbling, hissing, murmuring, and slurred words stripped of most context and meaning. 

Bertucci envisions the album as “soothsaying for this tumultuous historical moment” in which layers of voices reveal and obscure “images of dreams, warped news headlines and mythological imagery.” While not all of that conceptual framework made the leap into a significant part of my listening experience, Bertucci certainly conjures up one hell of a sustained and deeply abstract mindfuck that feels both timeless and otherworldly. 

The character of that mindfuck is best described as “a somnambulant seer in a space cave is trying to tell me something important, but her words are pulled apart and stripped of meaning because both reality and the physics of sound have begun unpredictably bending, stretching, and dissolving.” The closest signpost is probably the space whispering of Gong’s Gilli Smyth, but Bertucci’s vision is a radically deconstructed and aggressively minimalist twist on that aesthetic, as the only real “music” is an omnipresent drone of some kind and the occasional flute (aside from the closing “In This Time,” which improbably features the Wesleyan University Taiko Ensemble).    

Given Bertucci’s hyper-constrained palette of subtle drones and her own manipulated voice, most of these six pieces share a very similar feel (a spacey dream fog of flickering and stretched voices), but a few pieces transcend that baseline to achieve a more unique character. For example, the title piece has the feel of ASMR-loving ghosts drifting through a deserted and deadly silent space station (nicely enhanced by some breathy flute sounds that feel like submerged howls). I am also quite fond of the comparatively warm “In This Time,” as the percussion gives it an ancient/tribal feel and Bertucci’s hazy and fitfully melodic Siren-esque vocals are beautifully enhanced by a backdrop of air raid siren-esque vocal swoops. 

My favorite piece is “Two Way Mirror,” however, as Bertucci’s fragmented and stammering words leave behind lysergic vapor trails over spectral, didgeridoo-esque drones and visceral samples of industrial machinery that sound almost like screams (it is even great when the vocals fade away). In short, The Oracle is quite a spacey and immersive rabbit hole to plunge down and quite a wild departure for Bertucci as well. Given that, fans of her earlier work will likely find this challenging and abstract vision of hallucinatory sound poetry, caves, and “folkloric flutes” nearly unrecognizable as a Lea Bertucci album, but adventurous psychonauts will find plenty of deep and otherworldly psychedelia to luxuriate in (while presumably fraying their sanity a bit as well). 

Listen here.

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Lea Bertucci, “Of Shadow and Substance” (Cibachrome Editions, 2023)

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This latest full-length from NY-based composer/multi-instrumentalist Lea Bertucci features two longform Just Intonation commissions composed for small ensembles. Given that, it is no surprise that Of Shadow and Substance is a unique album within her discography, but the added participants and the non-standard tuning were not the only new elements, as Bertucci embraced a “textural approach to composition” as well.

The results are quite unique and compelling, as Bertucci and her collaborators nimbly avoided any missteps or predictable decisions to produce a shapeshifting and emotionally intense drone album like no other. In fact, even Bertucci herself was a bit surprised with how Of Shadow and Substance turned out, as she notes that these two pieces feel informed by a “sense of deep, ancestral knowing” beyond herself as an individual, which seems like a valid and insightful claim, given that she shared the driver’s seat with both ancient mathematical relationships and textural affinities and was also inherently prevented from falling back on any familiar scales or melodies. Ladies and gentlemen, Lea Bertucci has just crossed over into The Twilight Zone (or at least into releasing a killer album that borrows its title from that show’s introduction).

The opening “Vapours” was commissioned and performed by Italy’s Quartetto Maurice and was partially inspired by the dual meaning of the title (the elusive/precarious physical state and the “pseudo-scientific term to diagnose types of hysteria in women”). The musicians were instructed to visualize both meanings during their semi-improvisations and Bertucci’s hand is additionally felt through her control of “the sonic space” through “subtle processing and spatial mixing.” More importantly, it is one hell of a piece, as it gradually transforms from sensuously seething and simmering drones and whines into a visceral and heaving crescendo. Both halves are fascinating and beautifully executed and I especially enjoyed the spiraling intensity near the end, which calls to mind a swirling supernatural flock of birds. Moreover, there is plenty to appreciate in the details as well, as the various instruments enigmatically and organically “blur and coalesce into one entity, drifting from consonance to discordance in harmonic clusters.” Few things reliably delight me more than incredibly sophisticated compositions that feel like spontaneous living entities that just miraculously sprang into being.

The following title piece for double bass, cello, harp, percussion and electronics was commissioned by the Philadelphia-based ARS Nova Workshop. The presence of percussion is the most immediately obvious difference between the two pieces, but the first half of “Of Shadow and Substance” is also quite a bit more groaning and convulsive than its predecessor. Given that prickly nature, it took me a little longer to warm to it, but it certainly features some sublime passages of its own. Bertucci’s inspiration for the piece was “the accumulation of events over glacial periods of time as a metaphor for social and environmental shifts,” which she evoked by mixing “loops and layers fragments of the performance in real-time, resulting in a diffuse, swirling, self-referential mass of experience.” While it may sound a bit academic on paper, the reality is quite churning and physical, as the ensemble unleashes an inventive miasma of shudders, whines, moans, and squeals en route to an unexpectedly haunting final act that feels like viscous waves lapping at the shore of charred ruins (a fine way to end an album, I’d say). Of the two pieces, I still consider “Vapours” to be the album’s clear centerpiece, yet Bertucci is in especially inspired form for the entirety of this album and Of Shadow and Substance may very well be one of her strongest releases to date.

Listen here.