Friday February 21, 8pm
Amirtha Kidambi w/ Lea Bertucci & Matteo Liberatore
Live sound
Microscope is very pleased to present an evening of live sound by Amirtha Kidambi, Lea Bertucci, and Matteo Liberatore.
The approximately sixty-minute program features Kidambi performing vocals with Liberatore on guitar, followed by a duet with Lea Bertucci on tape machines and electronics, with whom Kidambi recently release the record “Phase Eclipse.”
The three artists push the expressive possibilities of their instruments, often collaborating as a way to experiment further and take their practices to unusual and unexpected territories. Kidambi and Liberatore’s intimate and deceptively minimal sets appear to be grounded in free improvisation, shifting across genres and incorporating various techniques for both the guitar and vocals. Kidambi and Bertucci’s loopy sound outputs are built upon Kidambi’s wide range of vocal tones and timbres that Bertucci alters in real time through electronics and manual interventions on tape machines to add a distinct element of analog warmth.
Further info about the artists follows below.
General admission $10
Students & Members $8
Program:
Amirtha Kidambi (vocals) and Matteo Liberatore (guitar)
Amirtha Kidambi (vocals) and Lea Bertucci (tapes & electronics)
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Lea Bertucci is a composer, performer and sound designer whose work describes relationships between acoustic phenomena and biological resonance. In addition to her instrumental practice with woodwind instruments, she incorporates multi-channel speaker arrays, electroacoustic feedback, extended instrumental technique and tape collage. In recent years, her projects have expanded toward site-responsive and site-specific sonic investigations of architecture. Deeply experimental, her work is unafraid to subvert musical expectation. Her discography includes a number of solo and collaborative releases on independent labels and in 2018, she released the critically acclaimed Metal Aether on NNA tapes. Lea is co-editor of the multi-volume artists book The Tonebook, a survey of graphic scores by contemporary composers, published on Inpatient Press. As a sound designer, Lea has collaborated with dance and theater companies including Big Dance Theater, Pig Iron Theater, Piehole!, and Mallory Catlett (Restless NYC). Her musical collaborations extend to other chamber-noise projects, notably a recently formed duo with vocalist Amirtha Kidambi, who will be releasing their debut album Phase Eclipse on Astral Spirits Records in the fall of 2019. As a solo artist, she has performed extensively across the US and Europe with presenters such as The Museum of Modern Art New York, Blank Forms, Museo Reina Sofia Madrid, Pioneer Works, The Kitchen, Roulette, The Walker Museum, Caramoor, The Renaissance Society Chicago, Muziekgebeow Amsterdam, and Unsound Festival, Krakow. She is a 2016 MacDowell Fellow in composition and a 2015 ISSUE Project Room Artist-in-Residence. In 2018, she received a commission from the American Composers’ Forum for a new percussion trio as well as a brass octet commissioned by the Levy Gorvy Gallery in New York.
Amirtha Kidambi is invested in the creation and performance of subversive music, from free improvisation and avant-jazz, to experimental bands and new music. As a bandleader, she is the creative force behind Elder Ones, featuring rising New York artists Matt Nelson, Nick Dunston and Max Jaffe. Elder Ones’ Holy Science and From Untruth released on Northern Spy, have received critical praise from the New York Times, Pitchfork, Downbeat and WIRE magazine. Kidambi topped the categories of “Rising Star Vocalist”, “Rising Star Composer” and “Rising Star Jazz Group” in the Downbeat Critics Poll for 2019. In 2018, she was the Artist-in-Residence at Roulette, where she premiered her solo work Yajna and vocal ensemble work with Lines of Light. She is active in an improvising duo with electronic musician Lea Bertucci, in a kinetic interaction with reel-to-reel tape machine, with the album Phase Eclipse released on Astral Spirits in 2019. Kidambi is a key collaborator in guitarist Mary Halvorson’s latest sextet Code Girl, the Sun Ra poetry project Angels & Demons with saxophonist Darius Jones, and in various collaborations with William Parker. As an improviser, she has played with New York luminaries including Matana Roberts, Tyshawn Sorey, Maria Grand, Brandon Lopez, Ingrid Laubrock, Ava Mendoza, Fay Victor, Trevor Dunn, Ben Vida, Tyondai Braxton and Shahzad Ismaily. Kidambi worked closely with composer Robert Ashley until the end of his life, premiering his final opera CRASH and had the honor of working with the late composer/pianist Muhal Richard Abrams for the premiere of Dialogue Social. Kidambi has performed and presented her music in the U.S. and internationally at Carnegie Hall, The Kitchen, Whitney Museum, EMPAC, Berlin Jazzfest and various DIY/punk spaces. Kidambi has received grants from the Jerome Foundation, Asian Cultural Council and artist residencies at EMPAC, Roulette and Bucareli 69 in Mexico City.
Matteo Liberatore is a boundary-pushing guitarist and composer working at the intersection of free, contemporary classical, and noise music. Based in Brooklyn, Liberatore spent much of his life in the medieval region of Abruzzo, Italy, amidst dramatic landscapes reflected in a playing style of “unsettling beauty” and “striking physicality” (The New York City Jazz Record). At the heart of Liberatore’s work is a mode of free improvisation guided by a compositional sensibility, one informed by his experience and training in a multiplicity of genres. Matteo Liberatore is known for his nuanced treatment of timbre, texture, gestures, and rhythms, often using extended techniques, electronics, and various preparations. This approach can be heard in his first solo album––aptly titled Solos––which was released by Innova Records in 2018: “This is not just sonic novelty or gratuitous use of extended techniques; each of the pieces, while largely improvised, [has] clarity and purpose” (Avant Music News). Solos was included in Ted Gioia’s best albums of 2018.