Lea Bertucci »The Oracle« (50. Leipziger Jazztage)

The Oracle for the Festival’s Anniversary! Within historic walls, acoustic premonitions take shape on the tape machine. Using field recordings, collages, and radical sound manipulation, Lea Bertucci creates immersive soundscapes.

Last year, the human voice was voted “Instrument of the Year.” What came as a surprise to some at first now seems, in hindsight, long overdue—as Lea Bertucci demonstrates with her new project, “The Oracle.”

Unlike in her previous works, the New York-based experimental musician deliberately places what is arguably the oldest instrument in human history at the center of her work. But Bertucci wouldn’t be Bertucci if she were to work with a simple one-to-one approach. Instead of authenticity, she consistently embraces artificiality, which is reflected not least in her use of numerous alienation effects. On stage, for example, she uses a tape recorder to manipulate her voice in real time.

Throughout the work, she artfully layers layers of meaning—fleeting thoughts, passing news headlines, dream images—into a stream of consciousness that is difficult to decipher. Temporal planes first begin to waver before they evaporate. By the end of this impressive work, it is no longer possible to distinguish between the everyday, the past, and the timeless. 

With “The Oracle,” Bertucci thus distills a diffuse yet widespread sense of the “simultaneity of the non-simultaneous.” Here, the past does not appear as a closed-off counterpoint to the present, but as something that continues to exert an influence within it and helps shape the future—a notion that also finds its counterpart in this year’s festival anniversary. 

(Luca Glenzer)