The bassoon tends to have some pretty "Peter and the Wolf" associations for most, but Lea Bertucci does as much violence to her horn as Jimi Hendrix did to the guitar. Like Hendrix's way-out-there late work with the Band of Gypsies, Lea makes great use of controlled feedback and manipulates her instrument's natural sound through pedaled electronics. I interviewed Lea about Twistycat, her duo with Baritone Saxophonist Ed Bear, which draws together a huge amount of musical impulses. Just when noisy feedback patterns start multiplying out of control as the band's horns hit a room's resonant frequencies, the horns stomp down with a low guttural grunt worthy of Peter Brotzmann's beefy sax tone. Freak-folk smear totally alien to the bassoon brings the band close to Charalambides or Double Leopards, but fluttering, note-filled solos also bring to mind Anthony Braxton.At times, the squalls of feedback and spacey textures levitate the horns into a completely disembodied state, but Twistycat's playing is some of the more visceral texture music I've seen live. "I'm obsessed with the idea of creating sound from the most essential life force—the breath", Lea tells me. "Every performance of improvised music is inherently site specific. I'm fairly sensitive when it comes to responding to my environment, so any shift in lighting, for example, or a siren going off outside can easily permeate my set and influence what patterns or tones I choose to play." This idea extends to the band's extensive use of controlled feedback. "Using feedback as an electroacoustic augmentation to my instrument lends itself very well to site specificity. Each space has its own 'room tone' or 'presence' that the feedback will naturally gravitate toward. So the tonality of anything I play is tied to the architectural/acoustic characteristics of a given space. I can also change the pitch based on my position in the room and which keys on my bass clarinet are open or closed."In full disclosure, most of the times I've seen Lea play has been in a very specific site—her loft in Bushwick. Dense Mesh is a monthly concert series of experimental music that's probably my favorite regular party in Brooklyn to boot. Lea and Ed usually perform in some configuration at these events. As of late, Lea has been showcasing her recent explorations with magnetic reel-to-reel tape collage, taking mundane sound sources like water draining in a tub or cars driving and transforming them into alien soundscapes. Lea and Ed are just about to release a tape together called Controlled Burn. Lea is performing during the Optipus Laboratory festival at Manhattan's longstanding space The Kitchen.
@natroePreviously - Watch C Spencer Yeh Melt Into A Radioactive Green Colorfield
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