Ben Vida and Lea Bertucci team up on album ‘Murmurations’

Music

The first collaboration from the veteran experimentalists incorporates live tape manipulation, modular synthesis, sampling, and real-time instrumental and vocal improvisation.

Throughout their respectively long-standing careers, native New Yorkers Ben Vida and Lea Bertucci have become known for pushing electroacoustic music into highly individualised realms.

Beginning to collaborate in the Summer of 2021 while living on opposite sides of the same mountain outside of Woodstock, NY, the duo developed a unique form of collaboration: a process of introspection that scrutinised the very practices of improvisation and joint composition and involved intertwining their individual practices so that the identities of each become increasingly ambiguous.

<a href="https://leabertucci.bandcamp.com/album/murmurations">Murmurations by Ben Vida + Lea Bertucci</a>

‘Murmurations’ comprises 10 tracks: 6 instrumental and 4 vocal, which combine musique concrète, sound poetry, free improvisation, and electroacoustic music. The product is abstract yet deeply human, posing a direct challenge to concepts of identity, temporality, and location as both artists deconstruct every sound element – vocal, instrumental, electronic – through intervention and action, to an elemental form.

“Murmurations” is issued by Cibachrome Editions on vinyl in two editions, the standard vinyl LP edition of 500 copies with custom artwork by Pittsburgh based artist, Erin Womack, as well as an artist edition of 25 copies of a 7” lathe cut of two tracks from the album, a special silk-screened poster of album artwork, and a download code for the full album. Pre-order the album here.