Lawrence English & Lea Bertucci to Release Debut Collaborative LP 'Chthonic'

Acclaimed experimentalists Lawrence English and Lea Bertucci today announced that their debut collaborative album, Chthonic, will release on August 11, 2023, via American Dreams.

Chthonic is the result of long-distance collaboration and mutual considerations. New York's Lea Bertucci and Australia's Lawrence English met in 2019 at the Novas Frequencia festival in Rio de Janeiro and quickly became friends and collaborators, driven by musings on a geological scale, movements – tectonic or otherwise – of the Earth, and subterranean density and pressure. Along with the announcement, the two artists shared "Geology of Fire," a first glimpse of their precipitous, shifting work. 

On the collaboration, English shared: “Lea and I met in Rio de Janeiro, we had both been invited to perform a special set of field recordings and site-specific sound on a small island in the middle of one of Rio’s larger public parks. I was very struck by Lea’s approaches to sound, specifically to her ways of contrasting particular qualities in sound she had collected across the city during her residency.

Our billing together there seemed like a natural fit and I am positive some of the earliest ideas for a possible recording started there. Throughout the course of our long-distance exchange, I found myself always digging deeper into the sound world we were creating. It was a sense of excavation, seeking things that just sat underneath the first impression of the sounds. Between that and our conversations around sound pressure and density, I think this record took on a form of its own very quickly.”

As the pandemic descended in early 2020, both artists’ studios became laboratories for remote collaborations. Recorded over the course of 2020/21, Chthonic is a document of a multi-hemispheric penpal correspondence, a sort of exquisite corpse wherein each artist would send the other a sketch of sound, gradually adding layers and editing into the final product.

The pair have impressive resumes. In the last five years alone, English has collaborated with William Basinski, Loscii, and Merzbow, and Bertucci has, over a decade-plus, released numerous wide-ranging, innovative releases and presented her music at prestigious museums around the world (MOMA, Walker Museum, ReWire, Unsound). 

On Chthonic, Bertucci branches out to instruments not usually found in her previous body of work. She plays cello, viola, flute, and lap steel guitar. English’s sound sources stem from field recordings, analog electronics, and tape. Conversations between the artists centered around moving large amounts of earth, biogeochemical cycles, and the cyclic nature of time. The results are deeply compelling and rooted in vastness of geological scale and time. It’s all here – the emotion, the scale, the density, the fear, the wonder, the dirt.

photo by PWR