Lea Bertucci is a NYC-based sound artist who focuses on tape loop and voice manipulation. Tonight’s performance was billed as a MA thesis program. Seems that Bertucci, whose installations have been featured worldwide, thought it would be a good idea to obtain a graduate degree from Wesleyan. The program had two long form pieces. The first was “Two Way Mirror” which revolved around stream of consciousness vocalization in which she warped her voice through creative misuse of a reel to reel tape machine. The tape extends and shatters words into fragments and confounds the relationship between language and meaning. The result seemed somewhere between Laurie Anderson and the Exorcist. Lea proceeded to expound with treated vocal fragments, “mass confusion and mass delusion”, “good government, good god”, “it’s a shame what has happened to the Americans”. The reel to reel lends an antiquated air to the piece, Lea hovers over the machine like a club DJ. The second piece was “ The Days Pass Quickly Immersed in the Shadow of Eternity” a work for multichannel speakers, electronics, and “live early flutes”. Lea had the audience move to the stage area and sit on cushions arranged in a circle around her. The music was taped flutes from Norbert Rodenkirchen, an early music scholar, who offered her sustained microtones from wooden and bone flutes. The instruments in this iteration were the Bass Renaissance, Medieval Traverso, Tenor Renaissance , Sheep Bone, and Swan Bone flutes. The result was haunting, ancient and modern. A fascinating journey that toggled time.
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