The Oracle for the Festival Anniversary! Within historic walls, acoustic premonitions take shape on the tape machine. Using field recordings, collages, and radical sound manipulation, Lea Bertucci creates immersive soundscapes.

Last year, the human voice was voted “Instrument of the Year.” What came as something of a surprise to some at first now seems, in hindsight, long overdue—as Lea Bertucci demonstrates with her new project, “The Oracle.”

Unlike in her previous works, the New York-based experimental musician deliberately places what is arguably the oldest instrument in human history at the center of her work. But Bertucci wouldn’t be Bertucci if she worked with a simple one-to-one approach. Instead of authenticity, she consistently embraces artificiality, which is reflected not least in her use of numerous alienation effects. On stage, for example, she uses a tape recorder to manipulate her voice in real time.

Throughout the work, she artfully layers layers of meaning—fleeting thoughts, passing news headlines, dreamlike images—into a stream of consciousness that is difficult to decipher. Temporal planes first begin to waver before eventually fading away. By the end of this impressive work, it is no longer possible to distinguish between the everyday, the past, and the timeless. 

In *The Oracle*, Bertucci thus distills a diffuse yet widespread sense of the “simultaneity of the non-simultaneous.” Here, the past does not appear as a closed-off counterpoint to the present, but rather as something that continues to exert an influence within it and helps shape the future—an idea that also finds an echo in this year’s festival anniversary.