Blume presents The Days Pass Quickly Immersed in the Shadow of Eternity, a new work by Lea Bertucci commissioned by the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and premiered in Karlsruhe in November 2025. Written for, and created in collaboration with, the flutist Norbert Rodenkirchen, it draws on his collection of Renaissance, Medieval, and Neolithic instruments, harnessing sounds that have been largely absent from the modern world. What does it mean to employ one of humanity's oldest known technologies, the flute, appearing in human hands tens of thousands of years before the advent of the wheel, within an experimental, electroacoustic composition that is inherently forward-thinking?
Since her emergence within New York City's Noise scene during the early 2010s, Bertucci has balanced a fierce dedication to the DIY ethos and immediacy of the underground with a refined sense of creative rigor and ambition, moving from brittle, challenging compositions for saxophone, electronics, and tape toward investigations of acoustic phenomena, site-specific resonance, and complex harmonic interplay. Following her return to the rural environments of Upstate New York where she was born and raised, her work has entered a more introspective phase, with an expanded instrumental, technical, and vocal palette that has found her increasingly composing for others, as on 2023's Of Shadow and Substance and on Fata Morgana, a work for organ released earlier this year.
The piece grew from a meeting with Rodenkirchen after a performance by the early music ensemble Sequentia, to which he belongs. Struck by his ability to conjure "spirits from deep within human memory, as a clarion call into the present", Bertucci began a series of conversations that led the pair into the studio at ZKM in the summer of 2024. Conceived for ZKM's 42.4 speaker system, grouped into 8 discrete outputs before being mixed down to stereo, the work aligns with the collaborative process she has honed alongside her solo efforts, in duos with Ben Vida, Lawrence English, and Olivia Block: a dialog with personal and responsive agency offered to both musicians.
It carries forward her inquiry into the fundamentally human aspects of listening ("I am looking for sounds that call from somewhere deep within the listener and that tap into archetypal human knowledge and feeling") and her investigation of psychoacoustic phenomena and otoacoustic emissions through a meticulous alignment of pitches and timbres. Where many of her most celebrated efforts played, and played with, the room, this one is rooted in an implied space: the flutes recall and blur the boundaries between the eras and environments in which those instruments were originally played, from acoustically engineered Renaissance and Medieval halls to the naturally reverberant caves of the Neolithic, and those of the present.
Bertucci is not the first to bring ancient sound sources into experimental music: Harry Partch's instruments drew on Greek, Chinese, and Japanese precursors, Alvin Curran regularly plays a conch shell, and Walter Maioli has spent decades working at the borders of experimental music and archaeology. Her piece occupies a more rarefied position through its hybridity, combining advanced technology with archaic sound sources while sidestepping the exoticism and romantic primitivism that can hobble such efforts. Compared with its closest cousin, Phill Niblock's Four Full Flutes, where the instruments are manipulated beyond clear recognition, here the flutes remain recognizable and embrace the layers of history they carry. The result is an electroacoustic work that largely forgoes the auditory signifiers of the idiom: it could easily pass for a live ensemble, and only attentive listening reveals that it could only have been made through advanced technology.
As Rodenkirchen's playing interweaves with Bertucci's computer-facilitated arrangements of flute samples, ranging from pulsing clusters to dense combinations of sustained tones, timbres, and distances, the piece draws connections with folk and spiritual traditions across human history: Medieval polyphonic ecclesiastical music, Sardinian canto a tenore, Pygmy vocal music, Buddhist chant. By conjoining one of our earliest known technologies with our most advanced, Bertucci proposes that our tools are not the message, but rather the unending continuum of humanity itself. Issued by Blume in a highly limited vinyl edition of 300 copies on transparent light blue vinyl, with newly commissioned liner notes by Bradford Bailey.
expected to be published on 23 Oct
