The Kitchen Presents Lea Bertucci's MASS OF DISSOLUTION

The Kitchen presents the world premiere of Mass of Dissolution, a new work from composer Lea Bertucci that takes an intensely industrial approach to contemporary percussion music (January 24). Conceived as an incantation against the blind violence of military-industrial power dominating global dynamics, and composed for percussion trio Tigue (Matt Evans, Amy Garapic, and Carson Moody), the work combines extended techniques for percussion with dislocated fragments of traditional American drum corps music. Bertucci will appear in performance to open the evening with a set by her newly formed duo with composer and vocalist Amirtha Kidambi. Called "ingeniously contemporary" by the New York Times, this project features improvisations by Kidambi processed by Bertucci through idiosyncratic misuse of tape machines. Organized by Matthew Lyons.

A commission from the American Composers Forum, Mass of Dissolution takes militaristic sounds that have a discomfortingly universal familiarity and deconstructs them. As evoked through Tigue's percussion, beats resembling helicopters, people marching in lockstep, drum corps fragments, and the sounds of industrial equipment crack into gear in the creation of a brutally efficient machine. But the composer and the percussionists throw a hopeful wrench in those gears; the machine can outpace itself, and fall apart.

Says Bertucci, "This is my first piece directly referencing another musical vernacular. The idea is to pervert military music, to reference, use, and transform it into something that is avant-garde in its aesthetic, in something of a prayer for the end of military violence."

Juxtaposed against the piece performed by the "delightfully unpredictable" (Boston Globe) Tigue, Bertucci and Kidambi's collaboration showcases the scope of Bertucci's talents as a performer and improviser, and highlights Kidambi, whose typically wordless vocalizations have been described as "express lanes to intensity" (The New York Times).

Lea Bertucci: Mass of Dissolution will take place January 24 at 8pm at The Kitchen, 512 W 19th St, New York. Tickets ($15 General / $12 Members), are available online at thekitchen.org; by phone at 212.255.5793 x11; and in person at The Kitchen, Tuesdays-Saturdays, 2:00-6:00pm.

About Lea Bertucci

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 often 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 collaborations extend to other chamber-noise projects, including a recently formed duo with vocalist Amirtha Kidambi.

As a solo artist, she has performed extensively across the US and Europe with presenters such as PS1 MoMA, Blank Forms, Pioneer Works, The Kitchen, Roulette, The Walker Museum, Caramoor, The Renaissance Society, Chicago, Sound of Stockholm Festival, 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.

About Amirtha Kidambi

Amirtha Kidambi is the composer and bandleader of her quartet Elder Ones, with Matt Nelson, Max Jaffe and Nick Dunston and the leader of her vocal quartet Lines of Light, featuring Anaïs Maviel, Emilie Lesbros and Jean-Carla Rodea. Kidambi is also a regular collaborator of Lea Bertucci, in a voice and analog electronics duo, is a member of guitarist Mary Halvorson's Code Girl, featured in various projects with composer and alto saxophonist Darius Jones, a longtime contributor of Charlie Looker's early music inspired dark folk band Seaven Teares and a soloist in Pat Spadine's analog percussion and light ensemble Ashcan Orchestra. She has collaborated and performed with New York luminaries in the experimental and creative music community including Tyshawn Sorey, Matana Roberts, Ingrid Laubrock, Maria Grand, Brandon Lopez, Daniel Carter, Sam Newsome, Trevor Dunn, Ava Mendoza, Matteo Liberatore and veteran improviser William Parker.

The New York Times writes Kidambi "takes a holistic approach to singing, which can mean treating every element as unfixed: Words can be opened up, rendered nonspecific. Melody can be repeated and frozen and stuck in place. Markings of rhythm can become utterly abstract, freed from cadence."

About Tigue

Tigue is a group of three percussionists with a fluid musical identity. The Brooklyn-based trio (Matt Evans, Amy Garapic and Carson Moody) makes their own kinetic and hypnotic blend of instrumental minimalism while opening up the possibilities of their instrumentation through commissioning and collaboration. Tigue's debut album Peaks was released in 2015 with New Amsterdam Records with highlighted performances at the Ecstatic Music Festival, Bric Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival, and the Zemlika Festival in Durbe, Latvia. Recent commissions and premieres have included works by Molly Herron, Randy Gibson, Jason Treuting, Adrian Knight and Robert Honstein alongside collaborative ventures with Kid Millions and visual artist / sculptor Michael Mercil. These works have been presented in concert halls, galleries, black box theaters and universities throughout the country including EMPAC, Roulette, The deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Noguchi Museum, Yale School of Music, and Princeton University. Praised for their focused and "high octane" performances (New York Times), the Ohio-born band members have worked together since they were practically children.