This latest release from the New York-based composer saxophonist is a bold and deeply psychedelic departure from her usual terrain (aside from being partially recorded in a cave, of course). The first big surprise is that The Oracle is an extremely vocal-centric album to an almost a capella degree. The other major twist is that Bertucci “creatively misuses a reel-to-to-reel tape machine to live-manipulate her voice” into an unpredictably kaleidoscopic and hallucinatory swirl of bubbling, hissing, murmuring, and slurred words stripped of most context and meaning.
Bertucci envisions the album as “soothsaying for this tumultuous historical moment” in which layers of voices reveal and obscure “images of dreams, warped news headlines and mythological imagery.” While not all of that conceptual framework made the leap into a significant part of my listening experience, Bertucci certainly conjures up one hell of a sustained and deeply abstract mindfuck that feels both timeless and otherworldly.
The character of that mindfuck is best described as “a somnambulant seer in a space cave is trying to tell me something important, but her words are pulled apart and stripped of meaning because both reality and the physics of sound have begun unpredictably bending, stretching, and dissolving.” The closest signpost is probably the space whispering of Gong’s Gilli Smyth, but Bertucci’s vision is a radically deconstructed and aggressively minimalist twist on that aesthetic, as the only real “music” is an omnipresent drone of some kind and the occasional flute (aside from the closing “In This Time,” which improbably features the Wesleyan University Taiko Ensemble).
Given Bertucci’s hyper-constrained palette of subtle drones and her own manipulated voice, most of these six pieces share a very similar feel (a spacey dream fog of flickering and stretched voices), but a few pieces transcend that baseline to achieve a more unique character. For example, the title piece has the feel of ASMR-loving ghosts drifting through a deserted and deadly silent space station (nicely enhanced by some breathy flute sounds that feel like submerged howls). I am also quite fond of the comparatively warm “In This Time,” as the percussion gives it an ancient/tribal feel and Bertucci’s hazy and fitfully melodic Siren-esque vocals are beautifully enhanced by a backdrop of air raid siren-esque vocal swoops.
My favorite piece is “Two Way Mirror,” however, as Bertucci’s fragmented and stammering words leave behind lysergic vapor trails over spectral, didgeridoo-esque drones and visceral samples of industrial machinery that sound almost like screams (it is even great when the vocals fade away). In short, The Oracle is quite a spacey and immersive rabbit hole to plunge down and quite a wild departure for Bertucci as well. Given that, fans of her earlier work will likely find this challenging and abstract vision of hallucinatory sound poetry, caves, and “folkloric flutes” nearly unrecognizable as a Lea Bertucci album, but adventurous psychonauts will find plenty of deep and otherworldly psychedelia to luxuriate in (while presumably fraying their sanity a bit as well).
Listen here.
