Signifying Something is an immersive interview and new-music podcast hosted by Safie Flato. Each episode features an in-depth conversation with a contemporary artist or musician, centered around a distinctive piece of newly released (or forthcoming) work. Through candid dialogue and contextualized listening, the show uncovers how these pieces emerge from personal inquiry, technological relationships, and sonic curiosity. Ideal for adventurous listeners and curious creators alike. Signifyingsomething.com and Patreon.com/signifyingsomething -- Venmo is @Steven-Flato-1 and last 4 digits are 5591 for verification for one-time-donations.
Episodes
Tuesday Jul 08, 2025
Tuesday Jul 08, 2025
(This episode was previously published in 2017)
Lea Bertucci is an interdisciplinary artist, composer and improviser working with installation, sound, and projection. As an instrumentalist, she focuses on an electro-acoustic preparation of the bass clarinet that heavily utilizes speaker feedback. In recent years, her projects have expanded to site-specific compositions for electronics and instruments, multichannel sound installations and music concrete collage. Her new album, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, is being released on NNA Tapes at the end of March.
On this initial episode of Signifying Something, Steve Flato and Bertucci play and discuss her composition Oracle (Quartet Version). From there, the conversation goes onto explore Lea’s process in making a composition for voice— an instrument she has not studied— and how she demos and listens to these scores without being a vocalist herself; beating patterns in notes, microtonality, and just intonation; her focus on the spatial aspects of the room where her works are performed; Schoenberg and “New Music”; systematic composition and rule-based work; the pieces made at her Issue Project Room residency— Cepheid and Cepheid Variations— and their exploration of resonance; extended instrumental techniques; Lea’s multichannel piece, Double Bass Crossfade (which appears on her new NNA release All That Is Solid Melts Into Air); her approach to her tape music and her view of digital processing in that context; Lea’s ongoing concert series Dense Mesh; and how to know when you’ve finally finished a composition.
Links:
Artist Statement Generator: www.500letters.org/form_15.php
Lea Bertucci's website: http://lea-bertucci.com/
Intro & background music by Steve Flato
Featured music by Lea Bertucci
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