The Lab: July, 2022

Lea Bertucci and Suzy Poling (photographs by Colin Conces and Nedda Afsari, respectively, from the event page for the concert being discussed)

As of this writing, there will be only one performance at The Lab this month. However, it will be a two-set evening. Both of those sets will be solo recitals, but each will have its own approach to departure from usual recital practices.

Lea Bertucci specializes in wind instruments (such as the saxophone shown in her photograph above). However, she is an experimentalist in both composition and performing. Her performances make use of spatialized speaker arrays, while her approaches to composition tend to be based on radical methods of free improvisation. She also seems to appreciate the value of “accidents” through practices that date all the way back to the pioneering work in musique concrète by Pierre Schaeffer and his colleagues. Bertucci’s approach involves creative misuses of audio technology applied to field recording sources subjected to both sampling and collage techniques.

The other set will be taken by Suzy Poling, who will present her Pod Blotz project. This also involves intersections of electronically synthesized and concrete sounds. Poling has been pursuing this project since 2002. She has been touring the United States to present her work and has released over 25 cassette and vinyl recordings. Many of her performances took place in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lived for almost a decade; but she is now based in Los Angeles.

This concert will begin at 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, July 9. For those unfamiliar with the venue, The Lab is located in the Mission at 2948 16th Street, a short walk from the corner of Mission Street. The location is particularly good for those using public transportation, since that corner provides bus stops for both north-south and east-west travel as well as a BART station. Doors open half an hour before the concert is scheduled to begin; and, back before the pandemic, it was usually the case that a long line had accumulated prior to the opening. General admission will be $15. Tickets may be purchased online through a Web page managed by Withfriends. The hyperlink for purchasing tickets brings up a Web page which, in turn, provides a hyperlink to a Web page for discounted prices and benefits available to members of both The Lab and Withfriends. Both mask and proof of vaccination will be required for entry.