False Harmonics #9: Lea Bertucci: Premiere of "Of Shadow and Substance" for ensemble with Henry Fraser, Lester St. Louis, Lucia Starvos & Matt Evans and duo with Olivia Block

False Harmonics is a musical series meant to explore new music and alternative approaches to composition, improvisation and performance.

For the 2022 return of False Harmonics, we are pleased to present new work by past music resident Lea Bertucci, in her first performance at Pioneer Works since 2018’s Dream Machine. Bertucci will present a new duo with Olivia Block, as well as the premier of Of Shadow and Substance for ensemble, featuring Lester St. Louis (Cello), Henry Fraser (Double Bass), Matt Evans (percussion) and Lucia Stavros (harp).

About the artists:

Lea Bertucci is an artist, composer and performer whose work describes relationships between acoustic phenomena and biological resonance. In addition to her longstanding practice with woodwind instruments and electronics as a performer, her work explores spatial approaches to composition, radical methods of free improvisation and creative misuses of audio technology. In recent years, her projects have expanded toward site-specific and site-responsive sonic investigations of architecture and acoustics. Her idiosyncratic approach to music is marked by dense masses of sustained dissonance and a fascination with the sonic substance of common experience through eccentric methods of field recording and sampling. Tape manipulation and other creative recording techniques push the limits of the recorded medium to elicit a visceral sonic and emotional experience from the listener.

Her discography spans over a decade, with eight releases of full-length solo albums and a number of collaborative projects, notably a new project with composer Ben Vida for woodwinds, electronics, voice and tape. In 2018 and 2019, she released the critically acclaimed solo albums Metal Aether and Resonant Field on NNA Tapes and in 2021, founded her own imprint, Cibachrome Editions, with A Visible Length of Light as the inaugural release.

She has performed and exhibited across the US and Europe with presenters such as The Museum of Modern Art, Levy Gorvy Gallery New York, Blank Forms, Gagosian Gallery, Pioneer Works, The Kitchen, ISSUE Project Room, Roulette, The Walker Museum, Tempo Reale in Florence, Muziekgebouw Amsterdam, Museo Reina Sofia Madrid, Sound of Stockholm Festival, ReWire Festival, Borderline Festival, and Unsound Festival Krakow. Artist residencies include the MacDowell Colony and Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. She has created commissioned works with Quartetto Maurice, TILT Brass, Tigue in 2018-2021 and for the INA GRM Paris and ARS Nova Workshop in 2022.

Olivia Block is a media artist and composer. In addition to her live performances and recordings, she creates installations and scores for orchestra and chamber music concerts. Her recordings vary in style, but maintain Block’s distinctive emotional sensibility. Her recordings are published on Another Timbre, Erstwhile, Glistening Examples, NNA Tapes, Room40, Sedimental, and Touch, among other labels. Her new album, Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea (Room40) was deemed “Contemporary Album of the Month” (November, 2021) by Jennifer Lucy Allan in The Guardian. A feature in The Wire Magazine, edition 454, December, 2021, highlights the album.