Lea Bertucci

Acclaimed experimental musician, composer and performer Lea Bertucci has announced that on December 8th she will release Xtended Vox, a compilation of avant-garde voice pieces, via SA Recordings as well as an accompanying Spitfire Audio voice sample library. Today, Bertucci has shared 'Tulsa', a new track featuring Ben Vida and the first piece to be taken from the compilation. 

This is the second release and library Lea has done with SA Recordings and Spitfire, her 2020 project Acoustic Shadows, received high acclaim making it into Boomkat’s top 5 albums of the year as well as being The Guardian’s contemporary album of the month. Curated by Lea, this project features four acclaimed creative vocalists and pioneers of the avant-garde, stretching over a number of generations and across varying geographies, these artists lend their unique sonic vocabularies to the project, including Audrey Chen, Phil Minton, Cansu Tanrikulu and Ben Vida. 

Taking a timbral approach to the sounds, the library and compilation encompasses the most radical of vocal techniques from the most fragile of whispers to throat singing and even alien nasal sounds. Xtended Vox pushes the boundaries of what can be done with contemporary voice, melding free improvisation with formalised composition. Bertucci describes the compilation as “deeply human music”, referencing Joan La Barbara’s 1976 album Voice Is the Original Instrument, Bertucci’s newest project celebrates the voice and the idea of how it is the first and only innate instrument, experimenting with the most ancient instrument in a contemporary context, with diverse and contrasting approaches from all of the compilations collaborators.

Bertucci’s approach to music is marked by dense masses of sustained dissonance and a fascination with the sonic substance of common experience. Her work spans over a decade, with 8 full-length solo albums and a number of collaborative projects. In 2018 and 2019, she released solo albums Metal Aether and Resonant Field on NNA Tapes, and has since gone on to found her own label, Cibachrome Editions, with 2021’s A Visible Length of Light as the inaugural release followed by 2022’s Murmurations, a duo with composer, improviser and artist Ben Vida who features on Xtended Vox alongside Lea on ‘Tulsa’.

Vida’s work explores aural phenomena, language, durations and systems, the pair met during the Summer of 2021, while living on opposite sides of the same mountain outside of Woodstock, NY. What began as a series of conversations between friends, slowly formed into the development of a unique form of nonhierarchical improvisation that challenged and rethought the nature of dialog and language itself; intertwining their respective practices into a series of fluid compositions where the identities and locations of each artist become progressively obscure.

Also featured is Turkish artist Cansu Tanrikulu's new piece, ‘Drank vs. Drunk’. Cansu is a singing multi-instrumentalist, composer, producer and improviser. Tanrikulu uses elastic singing, wide stylistic vocabulary and a far reaching approach to melody and text based improvisation. She collaborates with exceptional creatives making shape-shifting music mostly based on topics that are hard to imagine as musical entities at first glance.

Also on the compilation are three collaborative pieces named ‘We Do Wish We were With You’ by Audrey Chen and avant-garde legend Phil Minton. The two have been performing as a duo for more than a decade with concerts and tours across Europe, China, Argentina and Brazil. In 2013, the duo released By the Stream via Subrosa and in 2020 they shared the follow up, Frothing Morse, via Tour de Monde.

Over the past 20 years, Berlin based Chinese/Taiwanese-American Audrey Chen has focused predominantly on her solo work, joining together the extended and inherent vocabularies of the cello, voice, and analog electronics. In the last few years, she has shifted back towards the exploration of the voice as a primary instrument, delving even more deeply into her own version of narrative and non-linear storytelling. She derives her sound material in continuous process, championing the “in-between” and overlooked. Regardless of instrument, her mode of experimentation touches both the abstractly beautiful and the aggressively unsettling, creating a kind of curiously imagined architecture, non-prosaic song or ritual that reaches beyond gravity or language.