Late Night: Lea Bertucci & Ben Vida

The online music magazine Pitchfork speaks of a "ghostly intensity" that permeates the album "Murmurations". Corona Year 2021 began the collaboration between avant-garde musician Lea Betucci and electronic musician Ben Vida, both of whom have been part of New York's experimental scene for many years. Bertucci's saxophones and flutes meet Vida's synthesizer-generated, droning soundscapes. "Murmurations" - murmurs and hisses - are the basis of this mature, deeply sensitizing listening experience. It is as if atmospheric noises, voices, timbres are steadily condensing and you yourself are enclosed in an almost meditative, electroacoustic space. The formless and yet substantial music embraces the whole body. It could easily be interpreted as stoic, writes critic Jonathan Williger, "but at its core is a dynamic and sustained playfulness." The playfulness involves curiosity. There is no sense of being presented with something ready-made, but rather an open-ended, experimental search for something that cannot be found. Or a need to keep checking the generated tones, clusters, phrases, drones for coherence, but doing so without any pattern or scale. Music as a process. There is a magic in Bertucci and Vida's approach, Williger writes. "Difficult" music is thus transferred into the realm of fun. Doesn't that sound promising?