PERFORMANCE: Lea Bertucci + Olivia Block

Name: PERFORMANCE: Lea Bertucci + Olivia Block
Start: 2025-09-10T19:00:00-04:00
Location: 120 College Street, Asheville, NC, United States, North Carolina 28801

Schedule

Wed, 10 Sep, 2025 at 07:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

120 College Street, Asheville, NC, United States, North Carolina 28801 | Asheville, NC

PERFORMANCE: Lea Bertucci + Olivia Block
Wednesday, September 10th, 2025 at 7pm
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center {120 College Street}
TICKETS – $12 General Admission / $8 for BMCM+AC members + Students w/ID
Join us for a duo performance by Lea Bertucci and Olivia Block live at BMCM+AC, on Wednesday, September 10th, 2025 at 7pm.
Olivia Block and Lea Bertucci’s first collaborative release, I Know the Number of the Sand and the Measure of the Sea is out on Room40.
Lea Bertucci is an experimental musician whose works revolve around electronic and spatial extensions of instrument and voice. In addition to her longstanding practice performing with woodwinds, she has created compositions for strings, brass, percussion and other instruments, often incorporating electronics and multichannel sound. With an ear toward site-responsiveness and acoustics, her work has expanded toward installation and non-linear presentations of her music, often staged in hyper-resonant spaces.
Her discography spans over a decade, with eight full-length solo albums and a number of collaborative projects. In 2018 and 2019, she released solo albums Metal Aether and Resonant Field on NNA Tapes, and has since founded her own label, Cibachrome Editions, with 2021’s A Visible Length of Light as the inaugural release. Recent collaborations include duos with Lawrence English, Olivia Block, and Ben Vida. She has released on a number of labels including Astral Spirits, Room40, American Dreams and Dinzu Artefacts.
She has performed both within the US and internationally with presenters such as The Museum of Modern Art New York, The Metropolitan Museum, Blank Forms, Gagosian Gallery, Pioneer Works, The Kitchen, The Walker Museum, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Tempo Reale in Florence, Muziekgebouw Amsterdam, Museo Reina Sofia Madrid, ReWire Festival, Borderline Festival, and Unsound Festival Krakow. In 2018, she was awarded a Jfund for New Music grant from the American Composers’ Forum and a commission for a brass octet from the Levy Gorvy Gallery in New York. Lea has attended artist residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, The MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts and ISSUE Project Room. She has received commissions from the INA GRM in Paris, Quartetto Maurice in Turin, and ARS Nova Workshop in Philadelphia. She is a 2024 recipient of the Gigahertz Production Prize from the ZKM in Karlsruhe.

“Very boss” – Byron Coley, The Wire Magazine
“Bertucci… mines the kaleidoscopic possibilities of the sax” – Marc Masters, NPR
“I can imagine assembling legos to that” – Tom Waits, BBC6

Olivia Block (1970) is a media artist and composer based in Chicago. For nearly 30 years, she has been a pioneering force in the world of experimental music. Her discography is published on Another Timbre,Black Truffle, Erstwhile, Glistening Examples, NNA Tapes, Room40, Sedimental, and Touch, among other labels. She performs live experimental music in festivals and concerts around the world, where at any given concert she might be playing electronic instruments, piano, organ or amplified objects. Block also creates surround sound concerts, sound installations and scores. Her latest solo release, The Mountains Pass (Black Truffle), features Block singing and playing piano.
Block has performed, premiered and exhibited her work throughout Europe, America, and Japan in tours in festivals and performance series including Incubate (Tilburg), MoogFest, Festival del Bosque Germinal (Mexico City), Sonic Light (Amsterdam), Redbull Academy, Kontraste (Krems), Dissonanze (Rome), Archipel (Geneva) Angelica (Bologna), Sunoni per il Popolo (Montreal), and many others. Additionally, she has presented work at the ICA (London), MCA (Chicago), La Biennale di Venezia 52nd International Festival of Contemporary Music, The Kitchen (NYC), ISSUE Project Room, Experimental Intermedia (Brooklyn), and TIFF (Toronto).
Block has created site specific sound installations for public spaces and exhibition spaces worldwide, including the including Arthur Ross Gallery at University of Pennsylvania, CEAM at Flagler University, MCA Chicago, Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech, Museo Reina Sofia, and University of Chicago, Manhattan Museum of Arts and Design, Sokolowsko Sanitorium (Poland), CONTEXT (Miami and NY), The Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park (Chicago), and at the “Echoes Through the Mountains” exhibit at the 2006 Winter Olympics (Turin, Italy). She is currently completing an installation for The Nasher Sculpture Center, to be included in the Harry Bertoia Retrospective in early 2022.
She has taught at The School of the Art Institute in the Sound Department and at Northwestern University in the Sound Arts and Industries program. She has completed many university teaching residencies and teaches workshops around the world.
Learn more: https://www.blackmountaincollege.org/events/lea-bertucci-olivia-block/