Winds Bells Falls is the meeting between two of New York’s most unconventional musicians, sound artist Lea Bertucci and multi-everything instrumentalist Robbie Lee. The duo mix colorful free improv with musique concrete, sculpting experimental instrumental noise into a fascinating and even joyful encounter. On the album Lee plays medieval and baroque woodwinds, celeste (bell keyboard), and tubular chimes, while Bertucci live-manipulates and mangles his playing, hands inside a reel-to-reel tape machine, transforming and transfiguring in real time.
The album begins with “Glitter And Gleam,” where the magical sparkling tones of the warped celeste do just that. It is an unexpectedly cinematic opening, slowly building to a shimmering and even emotional peak, but that gives no hints abouts where the album goes next. The three pieces for tape and woodwinds are earthier and dirtier, clusters of noise that unfold like short stories. These pieces play with arcs of energy, the push and pull between Lee’s source sounds and Bertucci’s radical instant reimagining. The album is like a dream narrative, sometimes twisted and terrifying but often enchanted.
The recording began at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works, in a shipping container studio during Bertucci’s artist residency in 2019. That first session created the pieces using Lee’s woodwinds: the human-sized contrabass recorder, the mouse-sized medieval gemshorn, and wooden traverso flute from the early 1700s. For the other pieces they moved to Lee’s studio, bringing in Lea’s reel-to-reel tape machine and electronics, with Lee on 1920s bell instruments — vintage tubular bells, and the pearloid covered celeste keyboard (usually heard in its twinkling tones in The Nutcracker and many lush midcentury jazz/pop standards).
Robbie Lee is a Brooklyn-based improviser and composer, involved in a spectrum of areas ranging from experimental to pop music. He is best known for collaborations with Mary Halvorson, Che Chen (75 Dollar Bill), Neil Hagerty, and Glasser. He has been recognized both for using unconventional acoustic instruments in electronic-like creative ways, and his ability to draw eclectic character out of the conventional — The Wire magazine called his playing “a striking and creative contribution to the literature of improvised music.”
Lee’s most recent recordings are Prismatist (Relative Pitch) and Loss And Gain with Brian Chase (Yeah Yeah Yeahs) and James Ilgenfritz. He is equally at home exploring the deepest fringes of tuning and tonality, and in the modern production studio. Lee has also collaborated with Cass McCombs, Baby Dee, Eleanor Friedberger, Jozef Van Wissem, and Love As Laughter, among many others.
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, her work incorporates multichannel speaker arrays, radical methods of free improvisation and creative misuses of audio technology applied to field recording and sampling/collage techniques.
Her discography spans over a decade, with eight releases of full-length solo albums and a number of collaborative projects, notably two releases with vocalist Amirtha Kidambi on Astral Spirits Records and 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 extensively across the US and Europe with presenters such as The Museum of Modern Art New York, Blank Forms, Gagosian Gallery, Pioneer Works, The Kitchen, 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. In 2018, she was awarded a Jfund for New Music grant from the American Composers’ Forum and a commission for a brass octet from the Levy Gorvy Gallery in New York. She has recently been commissioned by the INA GRM in Paris, Quartetto Maurice in Turin and by ARS Nova Workshop in Philadelphia for new compositions that are forthcoming in 2021/22.
RIYL – Pauline Oliveros, Fripp/Eno, Pierre Schaeffer, Herzog soundtracks, late Coltrane, Cecil Taylor by accident
Genres: Experimental, Free Improv, Avant-folk, Musique Concrete, Post-Rock, Prog, Jazz
Winds Bells Falls
1) Glitter and Gleam
2) Image Mirror
3) Meiosis
4) Bags, Boxes, and Bubbles
5) Division Music
6) Mitosis
7) Twine and Tape
8) Azimuth
9) Somebody Dream
Lea Bertucci – tapes and electronics
Robbie Lee – celeste (1, 4, 7, 9), baroque flute (2), gemshorn (5), contrabass recorder (8), orchestra chimes (3, 6)
Recorded by Ethan Primason at Pioneer Works, January 2019 (tracks 2, 5, 8)
and by Robbie Lee at Sine CIty, Brooklyn NY February 2019
Mastered by Elliott Sharp