SPITFIRE AUDIO Lea Bertucci — Acoustic Shadows

Atmospheric & expansive sound design textures

A palette of epic sound design textures, made in collaboration with experimental New York-based composer, Lea Bertucci. The library is made up of brass and percussion instruments performing a selection of extended techniques, transformed by the extraordinary recording space in which they were captured — a cavernous industrial fridge, with stunningly reverberant acoustics.

From deep, ominous textural beds to eerie swells and thunderous hits, organic elements are complemented by evolving granular-based pads, made from the recorded material. These instantly playable cinematic sounds will add momentum, suspense and tension to your trailer music and compositions. Available in our dedicated plug-in.

Exploring space

This palette of fascinating sounds has been born out of Bertucci’s passion for sonic exploration and experimentation, seeking out 'extreme environments' as additional instruments in themselves to facilitate what she calls '4-dimensional composition'. Rather than a distillation of the sounds in Bertucci’s LP, this sample library takes Bertucci’s highly sophisticated sound design techniques and applies them to brand new recordings in a unique acoustic space, with specially curated instrumentation.

Taking advantage of the 10 second reverb tail and distinctive delay effects of a cavernous industrial fridge, Bertucci chose instruments that would excite its extraordinary acoustic characteristics — a bright solo trumpet, a deep, ominous solo tenor trombone and a range of tuned and untuned percussion instruments — performing unconventional extended techniques and timbral variations curated by Bertucci. The granular pads have been created from the recorded material using a convolution reverb of the space, adding an extra dimension of half-organic, half-synthetic sounds.

Lea Bertucci

Lea Bertucci is a New York-based composer, sound designer and performer whose work bridges performance, installation and multichannel activations of acoustic space to create unique sonic experiences. In addition to her performance practice with woodwind and brass instruments, her work incorporates multi-channel speaker arrays, electroacoustic feedback, extended instrumental technique, percussion and tape collage. In recent years, her projects have expanded toward site-responsive sound-based investigations of architecture, playing and composing in extraordinary places, from an underground lake in upstate New York to a nuclear plant in Stockholm. Deeply experimental, her work is unafraid to subvert musical expectation. Acoustic Shadows is a sample library released in conjunction with Lea Bertucci's LP.

The making of Acoustic Shadows

Acoustic Shadows is a work of three interlinked incarnations, which began as an event, became an album, and inspired the sample library. It started as a series of site-specific musical performances and a sound installation that took place in the enclosed hollow body of the Deutzer bridge in Koln, Germany, the rich existing aural architecture acting as crucial components of the installation and musical compositions, with an 8-channel speaker system distributed throughout the bridge became activated by three instrumental performances. Fragments of each performance were captured by microphones and played back after the performance in a loop of overlapping moments, creating a sonic accumulation that takes place over long stretches of time — a musical performance with no clear ending, eschewing notions of time and space.