Lea and Ben will present My Words Came Out Slow and Odd, a text-based composition for voices and electronics, trumpet, and reeds.

The duo's new work pushes the boundaries of language and intelligibility and extends the human voice through the aid of creative electronic processing. What new modes of communication emerge when language is in a constant state of morphology? How quickly can we recalibrate to allow for complex meaning to be projected onto abstraction? My Words Came Out Slow and Odd is a clattering, psychedelic whirl of heteroglossia, smears, and stutters.

Ben Vida and Lea Bertucci began collaborating during the summer of 2021, while living on opposite sides of the same mountain outside of Woodstock, New York. What started as a conversation between friends slowly developed into a unique form of nonhierarchical improvisation, one that examines the very nature of creative dialogue.

Since 2010 the Graham Foundation has partnered with Lampo to produce an international performance series held at the Madlener House. Lampo, founded in 1997, is a nonprofit organization for experimental music and intermedia projects.

Note that seating for this performance is very limited. Reservations are required for entry. If you make a reservation and then are no longer able to attend, please cancel your reservation through Eventbrite or email info@grahamfoundation.org to release the spot to someone on the waiting list. 

Ben Vida (b.1975, Dubuque, Iowa) is a composer, improviser and artist. His work explores aural phenomena, language, durations and systems. In the mid-1990s he co-founded the minimalist quartet Town & Country in Chicago. Later, after a move to Brooklyn, he shifted his focus to electronics and systems-based compositions that used psychoacoustics, aural phenomena and advanced synthesis techniques. Since 2015 he has composed pieces that combine his interest in experimental writing with his love of singing with people.

Slipping Control (2015), Vida’s multimedia composition for voices, video and electronics, premiered at Audio Visual Arts in New York and then traveled to Los Angeles and Athens. His six-hour performance piece for vocal ensemble and electronics, Reducing the Tempo to Zero premiered for Lampo in June 2016 and was staged at The Kitchen, New York; STUK in Leuven, Belgium; and Centro Pecci, Prato. And So Now (2018) was commissioned for the Brooklyn Academy of Music and performed at the BAM Fisher Space. Always Already, which was created in collaboration with the Yarn/Wire ensemble and vocalist Nina Dante, premiered for Lampo in March 2020 and was also performed in New York.

In addition to these works, he has developed projects with Marina Rosenfeld, Lucio Capece, and Lea Bertucci. He has released his music with many labels including Shelter Press, Kranky, PAN, iDEAL and 901Editions, among others. Vida teaches in the M.F.A. program at Brooklyn College.

Lea Bertucci (b.1984) is an artist who works with sound. Her projects describe relationships between acoustic phenomena and biological resonance. In addition to her longstanding practice with woodwind instruments, her work incorporates multichannel speaker arrays, radical methods of free improvisation, and creative misuses of audio technology. Recent projects have tapped into a space's unique acoustic properties, as in 2018’s Acoustic Shadows, a suite of compositions for the enclosed hollow body of the Deutz Suspension Bridge in Cologne.

She has released several solo albums and a number of collaborative projects, including Metal Aether and Resonant Field (NNA Tapes), and Phase Eclipse with Amirtha Kidambi (Astral Spirits). In 2021 she founded Cibachrome Editions and released A Visible Length of Light. Earlier this year the label issued Murmurations, her debut recording with Ben Vida.

Bertucci has performed her work throughout the U.S. and Europe, including at the Museum of Modern Art, Blank Forms, Gagosian Gallery, Issue Project Room, Pioneer Works, and The Kitchen, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tempo Reale, Florence; Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; and at international festivals, including Brückenmusik, Cologne; Sound of Stockholm, Stockholm; ReWire, The Hague; and Unsound, Kraków, among others.

Additionally, Bertucci has been an artist in residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha; MacDowell, Peterborough, N.H.; Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, Calif.; and Issue Project Room, New York. Bertucci's work has been commissioned by the INA GRM in Paris, Quartetto Maurice in Turin, and ARS Nova Workshop in Philadelphia.

Lampo, established in 1997, supports artists working in new music, experimental sound and other interdisciplinary practices. The Chicago-based organization's core activity has been and remains its performance series. Rather than making programming decisions around tour schedules, Lampo invites selected artists to create and perform new work, and then the organization provides the space, resources and curatorial support to help them fulfill their vision. Lampo also organizes artist talks, lectures, screenings and workshops, and publishes written and recorded documents related to its series.

Photo: Peter Ganushkin