Lea Bertucci: The Oracle

"I started noticing that the real weirdos were the people involved in experimental music communities. I felt like I found my culture there."

During an artist residency in California three years ago, Lea Bertucci started working on her newest solo album The Oracle.

Assembling this highly mystical, imaginative record, the New York-based artist, woodwind player and composer developed a method of working with improvised lyrics and vocals – which she cheekily refers to as ‘stream-of-unconsciousness’ – and live-manipulating her voice through a reel-to-reel tape machine.

Rooted in the noise and improvised music scenes, Lea is acclaimed for her sound installations and multichannel activations. Over the last years, she’s collaborated with key figures of the experimental music world such as Lawrence English, Olivia Block and Carlos Giffoni, releasing projects on established labels like Astral Spirits, Room40 and American Dreams, as well as setting up her own imprint Cibachrome Editions.

I spoke to Lea about her upbringing in rural Upstate New York, moving from jazz to visual art to noise music, and how she’s able to balance life as an experimental musician and composer with the economic realities in America today.

photo: Katherine Finkelstein

Lea, what are some of your earliest memories of sound?

Probably birdcalls. There’s this one North American bird, and I never figured out what it is, that gives this call that’s like a major second, a descending major second actually. Whenever I hear that, it brings me back to being a kid. I’ll figure it out one day.

You’re from the Hudson Valley, a place that alternative types, bohemians and hippies felt drawn to since at least the 1960s. How did you experience growing up there?

When I was a young child, I lived in the town of Woodstock, New York, which of course is famous for the festival, which didn’t even happen in the town, but also has one of the oldest artist colonies in the United States. There’s a history of people coming to pursue creative activities in the area. There’s also a long tradition, going further back into the 19th century, of utopian experiments in upstate New York. There’s the Oneida community, Mormonism is from Western New York, there are Mennonites – a lot of spiritualist communities. That is still part of the vibe up there.

When I grew up there in the 1980s and 1990s, it was a different community than it is today. Since COVID especially, it’s been massively gentrified. I live there again now, and a lot of people from New York City have moved there. Housing has basically become unaffordable. It’s a double-edged sword, because on one hand, I want to live in a creative, vibrant community, but on the other hand, I want to live in a community that is affordable for everyone. I do think it is a good time to be up there right now though, because there’s such a great scene with a lot of venues, and I have many collaborators there.

Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, who lives upstate too, confirmed that basically half of the Brooklyn scene lives up there now.

Yeah, everyone is just trying to figure out how to have a good quality of life, you know? But in the U.S., we don’t have any government guardrails against predatory investing. That’s a big issue up where I live – people buying multiple properties that they never even live on, just to rent them out as Airbnb use, so entire neighborhoods are just these temporary vacation homes. That really empties out communities, and there started to be some local legislation around that. I hope that we can fight against it on a local level.

Were your parents creative types as well, and was that the reason why they moved upstate?

My parents were working class Italian-Americans from Brooklyn that moved upstate in the 1970s. They bought a little cabin in the Hudson Valley and ran an antique business together for many years. My dad was a master woodworker, and my mom later became a yoga teacher. I’d say they were art-adjacent, but they were never artists. My dad was very serious about that. Like, he’s not an artist, but an artisan…

A craftsman.

Exactly.

What kind of music did they play around the house?

My mom loved Bob Dylan, while my dad was more of a jazz head. He loved Miles Davis and John Coltrane, the hard bop era, not necessarily the free jazz stuff. My parents had pretty good taste though. My mom did go through an Eagles phase in the 1990s, which I’m still working out for myself. (laughs)

When did you start playing instruments?

I started playing saxophone when I was nine years old in a public school band, and weirdly I’ve kept it up my whole life. Something about the saxophone was really magnetizing for me. I went to a pretty underfunded public school, so the music options were not so great there, although I had some excellent teachers along the way. Later in high school and afterwards, music was a way for me to meditate – this idea of practicing as meditation was very important for me; music as cathartic, emotional expression.

And when did you pick up the bass clarinet?

In college. I was playing a lot of jazz through high school, and when I went to university, I became very disenchanted with the culture of jazz which felt very machismo, very obsessed with virtuosity in a way that I felt was not conducive to creativity. I started getting into noise music and more experimental forms. I actually stopped playing music for a while when I was at university and studied visual art. Then music slowly came back into my life, and I decided that I wanted to play a different instrument that didn’t have the same connotations with a certain genre. I always loved Eric Dolphy, so I started playing bass clarinet.

photo: Katherine Finkelstein

Were you into pop music at all back in your high school and college days?

Yeah, definitely. I loved a lot of the pop music from the late 1990s and early 2000s. I was and still am a big fan of PJ Harvey. I was always more into the alternative stuff. I was rebelling against the Spice Girls and Britney Spears – that was not for me. Now I think it’s funny and kitschy, and I can kind of appreciate it in that sense.

What made you want to go back to music after doing mainly visual art?

I moved to New York City after I graduated from college, doing visual art for a number of years. I found that the art world was very square, a little too square for my taste. People were very conventional thinkers, and very in line with capitalism. This is just in the commercial art world, and I know that there’s a lot of underground art that was also happening, but I started noticing that the real weirdos were the people involved in experimental music communities. I felt like I found my culture there.

When did you start composing your own music?

I did a lot of improvisation for a long time, and it wasn’t really about writing. Around 2012/13, I wrote a piece for instruments that I wasn’t playing. That was a big landmark for me. I’m a person that is always searching, never content to just do the same thing. I think it’s important to be interested in the world around you, and expanding the possibilities of what you do, stretching yourself outside of your comfort zone. I loved to just show up and do a noise jam, which is still part of the practice, but I also was interested in expanding beyond that.

Who were some of the composers that inspired and influenced you?

Certainly Terry Riley, LaMonte Young, Éliane Radigue. But I took influences from a wide range of stuff, from Nina Simone to Gamelan music to Bulgarian choir singing. I’ve always had a really diverse listening practice.

Over the last few years, you’ve been increasingly focusing on the voice as an instrument and compositional element. What interests you about it?

For many years, I was very neurotic about my voice. It happens to a lot of people – someone along the way saying: “Oh, you can’t sing, you don’t have a good voice.” This is a very painful experience, because your voice is your original instrument. It’s basically you unfiltered, and it comes from your breath, from your life force. So I came to a point where I was ready to transcend that. I had worked with other vocalists and trained singers, processing their voices through a reel-to-reel tape machine. Eventually I decided to keep it a closed system and process my own voice, and I discovered a lot of interesting possibilities within that.

Language is an interesting area of exploration right now, because we live in an era where no one can communicate with each other. The discourse is so bad right now. We went from language being redefined in terms of social justice and equality to not being allowed to say certain terms because our fascist president will come after you. It’s a good time to mess around with it.

The discourse on social media seems very ritualized too. People just fire off these weaponized phrases at each other.

Even when you say ‘the discourse’ – well, there is no real discourse, it’s just people talking over each other, constantly correcting each other and trolling each other. There’s no connection, it’s just not happening.

Your first album that focused on voice and language was Murmurations, your 2022 collaboration with Ben Vida.

Yeah, that came from a very playful relationship that I had with Ben. We recorded it during the COVID lockdowns, just getting stoned and messing around. That was the first time that I really started using my voice.

Your new album The Oracle is another vocal-focused work, and it was three years in the making. Can you talk about the circumstances in which this material started shaping up?

It was a weird, difficult time for me. I was trying to figure out my life, trying to find my place in the world after COVID. I knew that if I’d move to Europe, I could easily sustain a career doing my music, but something about upstate New York called me back.

I took a lot of time to let that material ferment. I did a lot of other things, but this was always bubbling in the background. I’ll only release something if I feel like it’s the best that I could have made it, and it takes time for that to happen. I can’t just pump out material. This is establishing a new voice for myself, and also synthesizing all the social and political upheaval of those years, which have been pretty bad.

That is quite contrary to how the mainstream music industry works these days. As an experimental musician and composer, how do you navigate the economic challenges that come with such a slow way of working and releasing?

Well, the music industry has been hollowed out of capital, and the experimental music industry never had much capital to begin with. So I’ve been wondering if that is actually a potential liberation, to not have to rely on your art to make a living. You know, I don’t feel the pressure the same way as somebody working in more popular forms of music that has people to pay and record labels to satisfy. I can just do music on my own terms, which I think is more conducive to real creativity.

Does that involve a lot of performing on your side?

It comes in waves. This fall is pretty busy with a bunch of performances. In the summertime, I was just doing a lot of local stuff, and then I’ve been developing a couple new collaborations. I’m also working on this piece that’s going to premiere in Germany in November. It’s a collaboration with the medieval flutist Norbert Rodenkirchen, a master early musician. I’ve learned so much from working with him. We’re doing a multi-channel piece with his collection of early flutes. It sounds absolutely amazing. It’s going to be premiered at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, and I’m really excited about this piece.

Is that an area of music history that you’ve been interested in for a longer time?

Yeah, I got into this group called Studio der Frühen Musik, founded by Thomas Binkley. In the 1960s and 1970s, they were known for being very mystical interpreters of early music. Those albums are absolutely stunning, and I started listening to them maybe a decade ago.

photo: Ben Seimisch

Talking about the flute, I wanted to ask you about the opening track from The Oracle, “Oracular Chasm”, which sounds unbelievably haunting.

I recorded it in a former cement mine in upstate New York called the Widow Jane Mine. This place has an underground lake, so there’s a lot of drippy, echoey sounds. I’m using a Swedish shepherd’s flute, which only plays overtones, so it has a limited capacity in terms of what it does, but I made that piece with that flute, just layering the overtones and working with the acoustic characteristics of that space.

You’ve been referring to your vocal technique on some of these tracks as stream of unconsciousness. Can you explain that?

What I mean is that the lyrics are not predetermined. I’m improvising the words which are abstracted and broken apart – maybe you can hear a couple of words or just fragments of words. There’s an amazing artist and vocalist named Shelley Hirsch, and Shelley is a master of this. She is very responsive to the moment, super sensitive to everything around her. I will say that I kind of learned it from her.

When I do this process, I often tap into images from my dreams the night before, whatever is coming through unfiltered. I would also do this thing where I would read certain materials, so I would read the news, or books on Ancient Greek mythology or hypnotism or other esoteric subjects. Then I’d go into the studio and improvise, and it would come out however it chooses.

We’ve been touching upon spirituality quite a bit in this conversation. Do you actually have a spiritual practice that you adhere to yourself?

The closest spiritual practice that has been attractive to me is Zen Buddhism. I’ve done a lot of meditation in that discipline. A lot of that philosophy is super useful in dealing with issues of attachment and ego. As an artist, you have to temper that stuff all the time. You have to take care of your ego, because it’s so easy for it to get completely exploded or imploded in this world. I can’t say that I’m exclusively dedicated to Zen, but there’s a Zen monastery near where I live, so I’ve gone to retreats there. I like the simplicity of how they sit in their meditations.

Tibetan Buddhism is really interesting too, it’s a very maximal and psychedelic form of Buddhism, while the aesthetic of Zen is more about calmness and simplicity. I can never tell if I’m a minimalist or a maximalist, because some of what I do sure is fairly minimal, but there’s also just a lot of stuff going on in my music, so I’m unsure about where I fall in that way.

How do you listen to music these days, in terms of formats?

I have a nice record listening set up at my house. I also listen in my car where I have a CD player, and in my studio on my nice speakers. Different forms of music lend themselves well to different formats. Not everything should be on vinyl, not everything should be on tape. When I release things, it tries to be formatted for that particular type of media.

Any current listening obsessions?

Let me think… well, I’ve been listening to a lot of Robert Ashley.

Interesting, because I actually felt reminded of him listening to The Oracle.

Yeah, I finished a master’s degree this past year, and as part of the curriculum, you’re supposed to do a contextual concert where you perform works of other composers. I picked a Robert Ashley piece, an early one that is a little bit more obscure called The Wolf Man. This is a howling wall of harsh noise and feedback. It doesn’t sound anything like what most people know Ashley’s work to sound like, but it’s an amazing piece. It’s super rich with dark Americana vibes and foreshadows his later obsessions of character building. I love Ashley, and he’s a big influence, for sure.

What else are you working on right now?

I’m in Chicago at the moment, collaborating with Olivia Block. We had a record together that came out on Room40 in spring. We just did three shows together, and we’re gonna record just what we’ve been playing in these last concerts. Hopefully someone will put that out in the future.

Lea Bertucci’s new album The Oracle is out now on Cibachrome Editions.