Lea Bertucci

Lea Bertucci is an artist, composer, and performer whose work describes relationships between acoustic phenomena and biological resonance. In addition to her longstanding practice with woodwind instruments, her work incorporates multichannel speaker arrays, radical methods of free improvisation and creative misuses of audio technology. In recent years, her projects have expanded toward site-specific and site-responsive sonic interactions of architecture and acoustics, most notably in 2018’s Acoustic Shadows, a suite of compositions and sound installation that took place as part of the Bruckenmusik Festival, inside the hollow body of the Deutzer bridge in Koln, Germany.

With a discography that spans over a decade, Lea has released eight albums of full-length solo works and a number of collaborative projects, notably a full length album and EP with vocalist Amirtha Kidambi on Astral Spirits Records. A new project with Ben Vida for woodwinds, electronics, voice and tape, will be forthcoming in 2022. In 2018 and 2019, her critically acclaimed solo albums Metal Aether and Resonant Field were released on NNA Tapes. In 2021, she founded her own label, Cibachrome Editions, with A Visible Length of Light as the inaugural release.

Lea is co-editor of The Tonebook, a survey of graphic scores by contemporary composers, published on Inpatient Press in 2018. As a sound designer, Lea has collaborated with dance and theater artists including Big Dance Theater, Pig Iron Theater, and Mallory Catlett. As a music technologist and sampling enthusiast, she has created bespoke sample libraries for Slate + Ash and Spitfire Audio.

She has performed extensively across the US and Europe with presenters such as The Museum of Modern Art New York, Blank Forms, Gagosian Gallery, Pioneer Works, The Kitchen, The Walker Museum, Tempo Reale in Florence, Muziekgebouw Amsterdam, Museo Reina Sofia Madrid, Sound of Stockholm Festival, ReWire Festival, Borderline Festival, and Unsound Festival Krakow. In 2018, she was awarded a Jfund for New Music grant from the American Composers’ Forum and a commission for a brass octet from the Levy Gorvy Gallery in New York. Lea has attended artist residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, The MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts and ISSUE Project Room. She has recently been commissioned by the INA GRM in Paris, Quartetto Maurice in Turin and by ARS Nova Workshop in Philadelphia for new compositions that are forthcoming in 2021/22.

Ben Vida

Ben Vida is a composer, improviser and artist. His works explore aural phenomena, durations, language and communication.

In the mid-1990s he moved to Chicago and became involved with the city's multifaceted experimental music scene, co-founding the minimalist quartet Town & Country and releasing solo records under the moniker Bird Show. In the Mid-2000’s he relocated to Brooklyn and shifted his focus to electronics and systems based compositions which utilized psycho-acoustics, aural phenomena and advanced synthesis techniques. He also began showing his works for video, text and sound installation in galleries and arts institutions.

Since 2015 he has been composing pieces that combine his interest in experimental writing with his love of singing with people. His six hour performance piece for vocal ensemble and electronics, Reducing the Tempo to Zero, was staged at Lampo in Chicago, the Kitchen, NYC, STUK in Leuven, BE and in Italy at Centro Pecci, Prato. His work, And So Now, was commissioned for the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2018, and his newest piece, Always Already, scored for ensemble, electronics and voices, has been produced in collaboration with the YarnWire ensemble and vocalist, Nina Dante, and has been performed in New York and Chicago.

Besides his solo work he has developed recent duo projects with Marina Rosenfeld, Lucio Capece and Lea Bertucci. Vida has released his music with many wonderful labels including Shelter Press, Kranky, PAN, iDEAL and 901Editions just to name a few. His work has been featured in Artforum, The Quietus, Modern Painters, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Art Review, The Wire, The Creators Project, WIRED Magazine among others.

Vida has been touring and presenting his pieces for over 20 years, performing in venues such as the Guggenheim, NYC, the MCA, Chicago, MadeiraDig Festival, Fuchel, Maderia, Performa Biennial, NYC, EMPAC, Troy, NY, Berghain, Berlin, the Unsound Festival at the Cricoteka Museum, Kraków, the Sydney Opera House, Australia, Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Borderline Festival, Athens, the Royal Festival Hall, London, Moonji Cultural Center, Seoul, South Korea, INA/GRM, Paris, Shinagawa Gloria Chapel, Tokyo, Japan and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY.

Since 2017 Vida has taught at Brooklyn College in their Sonic Arts MFA program.