Lea Bertucci: Acoustic Shadows (LP, SA Recordings, October 2020)

I’m making a promise to myself, right here, right now: the next record I write about here will have proper tunes, or a proper rhythm, or maybe even (gasp!) both. I don’t know whether it’s something to do with All This Business that we’ve been having for the last few months, but I appear to be falling even more deeply than normal into a rabbit hole of drone, ambient, and experimental, and I’m not sure it’s necessarily healthy.

But not today. Today we’re listening to a New York sound artist playing a bridge in Cologne. It’s a condensed version of a long-form performance-cum-installation. On the A-side, an eight-piece brass ensemble parps and blarps from various nooks and crannies in the underside of the bridge, the sounds resonate and reverberate, and they are sampled and played back, and the whole thing combines with the background hum of people, of trams crossing overhead, of the city, and of the bridge, into a rather glorious and surprisingly uplifting racket. The B-side does something similar with a three-piece percussion outfit. It starts out quite sparse, occasional taps on a woodblock barely interrupting the general hubbub, but quickly builds into something quite intense. I am lost inside the giant drum-roll. No, the drum-roll is trapped inside me. No, I am the drum-roll. And the thing is, despite my nagging doubts about the tail-chasingly recherché drift of my musical habits, this record feels like it really is doing me good.

I bought this from Boomkat. They call it Modern Classical / Ambient.