From Liberatore and Kidambi’s album “Neutral Love:”

Amirtha Kidambi and Matteo Liberatore’s duo of voice and guitar creates improvised aural landscapes that are glacial and highly evocative, unfurling through dynamic gestures that are at once spacious and restrained. Juxtaposed against the frenetic pace characteristic of the New York improv scene, the pair applies the compositional aesthetics of Feldman or Oliveros to a free environment. The project is set apart from Kidambi’s work with Lea Bertucci, Mary Halvorson or Elder Ones and Liberatore’s collaborations with musicians including Elliott Sharp, Mark Kelley and Catherine Sikora. Each piece explores the unique possibility space created by the union of voice and guitar, delving deep into specific permutations including registral extremes, detuning and quiet mouth sounds, all without the use of processing. After a prolonged period of isolation, the duo emerged to record and play together for the first time since the start of the pandemic. The music is nuanced, patiently developing as the subtleties of gradual seasonal change or the awareness of sound in meditation. Like shifting color gradients and patterns on a canvas of Agnes Martin, timbral shading and repetition form large-scale impressions. Neutral Love investigates an emotional inner world, taking its name from The Passion of G.H. by Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, a narrative monologue of a woman’s existential spiral. While Kidambi and Liberatore come from radically different backgrounds, they draw from universal sonic signifiers, like the ringing of the bell at a Hindu temple threshold or the echo of church bells across the piazza of a small Italian town, invocations to prayer and reflection. The duo’s interactions simmer beneath an anti-climax, begging the listener to observe one’s surroundings, turn inward, and confront the self.

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Amirtha Kidambi is invested in the creation and performance of Creative Music, from free improvisation and avant-jazz, to experimental bands, Carnatic voice and new music. She is a composer, vocalist, scholar, educator, activist and organizer. As a bandleader, she is the creative force behind Elder Ones and vocal group Lines of Light, receiving critical praise from such publications as 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 and “Female Vocalist” in El Intruso’s International Critics Poll. She is active in an improvised collaboration with electronic musician Lea Bertucci, in a kinetic interaction with reel-to-reel tape machine, releasing two albums on Astral Spirits. Kidambi is a key collaborator in Mary Halvorson’s latest sextet Code Girl, Angels & Demons with Darius Jones, duos with Luke Stewart and Maria Grand, several projects with William Parker, and worked with Muhal Richard Abrams and Robert Ashley before their passing.

Matteo Liberatore is a boundary-pushing guitarist and composer working at the intersection of free, contemporary classical, electronic, 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 and composing style of “unsettling beauty” and “striking physicality” (The New York City Jazz Record). Liberatore is known for his nuanced treatment of timbre, texture, gestures, and rhythms, and his work aims to convey precise musical ideas––whether through the elegant immediacy of unadorned instrumentation or the affecting dislocations of electronics and preparations. The latter approach can be heard in his first solo album––aptly titled Solos––released on Innova Recordings 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.

Lucie Vítková is a composer, improviser and performer (accordion, hichiriki, synthesizer, harmonica, voice and tap dance) from the Czech Republic, living in New York. Their compositions focus on sonification (compositions based on abstract models derived from physical objects) while in their improvisation practice Lucie explores characteristics of discrete spaces through the interaction between sound and movement. In Lucie’s recent work, they are interested in the social-political aspects of music in relation to everyday life and in reusing trash to build sonic costumes.

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Microscope’s Event Series 2021 is sponsored by Re:Voir, a home video label for classic and contemporary experimental film in Paris, France.