Kety Fusco – BOHÈME CD
The instrument has always carried a weight of cultural determinism. The guitar is often associated with rebellion, the piano is renowned for its erudition, while the cello is known for its melancholic depth. The harp, however, has traditionally been burdened by the most ethereal and arguably the most constrictive archetype of all, grace, antiquity, the accompaniment to heavenly choirs or the ambient padding. To approach the harp is often to approach a finished story, paved by centuries of aesthetic expectation. Kety Fusco’s second studio album, BOHÈME, is, by her own declaration, an artistic manifesto or a breath of freedom beyond all conventions. It is a necessary preamble to an experience that utterly weaponizes the instrument’s legacy against itself. BOHÈME systematically destabilises the usual perception of it, wrenching it from the soft-focus sound carpets and arpeggios of tradition and embedding it within a universe no reasonable listener would associate with its bronze strings and ornate column. Fusco’s project, therefore, becomes not just one of musical composition but one of conceptual sonic insurgency. Fusco and her collaborator, the award-winning film composer Nicolas Rabaeus, elected for a puritanical limitation, all sounds on the album originate exclusively from the harp. This constraint is the engine of its liberation. The brilliance of this material lies in the radical methods employed to meet this challenge, resulting in a soundscape where the instrument is not just played, but actively tortured, manipulated, and recontextualised until it assumes the forms of electronic textures, industrial drones, and guttural, organic noise.
Consider the thoughtful sonic engineering that went into this. When the liner notes reveal that some recordings were made underwater, the true scope of this dedication to acoustic alchemy becomes very clear. This is not a studio gimmick but an attempt to record the harp’s inherent voice in environments that fundamentally disrupt its harmonic qualities and traditional decay. By plunging the resonating body into an alien medium, Fusco captures the deep, viscous shudder of the instrument, extracting timbres that mimic subterranean rumblings, metallic creaks, or the slow, distorted exhalations of a submerging vessel. The album functions as a practical demonstration of musique concrète principles, albeit filtered through the singular, almost quixotic dedication to a single source. Fusco takes the raw, inherent vibrations of the strings and the percussive attack of the soundboard and subjects them to extreme post-production processes. Pitches are lowered to sub-bass territory, transforming notes into menacing pulses. High-frequency artifacts, the creak of the tuning pegs, the friction of the fingers against nylon, the subtle mechanical groan of the frame, are amplified and foregrounded, becoming the rhythmic skeleton of the compositions. This sonic transformation is inextricably linked to the central theme of nonconformity. To be a musician working with the harp is, in many senses, to be expected to conform to the instrument’s established canon. By forcing the harp to speak in a broken, synthesised, or even hostile voice, Fusco asserts an independence from this canon. The harp becomes an object of abstract expression, divorced from its historical associations and given a new semantic charge. It is the sound of an artist demanding that the tool serve the vision, rather than the vision being dictated by the tool.
The presence of the legendary Iggy Pop, who had previously championed Fusco’s work on BBC Radio, offers an essential piece of contextual validation. Iggy Pop, the original sonic bohème, the architect of raw, stripped-down rock and roll, lending his imprimatur to this project, is telling. It places Fusco not in the sphere of classical experimentalism, but firmly within the lineage of punk, noise, and radical artistic refusal. The collaboration signals that BOHÈME‘s disruptive energy is not a polite detour into the avant-garde, but a legitimate entry into the realm of artists who seek to dismantle and rebuild existing structures through deliberate aesthetic abrasion. Tracks carefully shift from moments of near-ambient dread, built from slow-moving, heavily modulated tones that hang suspended like toxic mist, to passages of frenetic, almost arrhythmic activity. In these latter sections, the harp’s original character momentarily flashes through, a quick burst of arpeggiated clarity, only to be instantly submerged again by layers of reverberation and distortion, these layers gasp for air before being pulled back under the mire. The listener is forced to constantly re-evaluate the source material. Is that a synthesiser pad, or a bowed, filtered string? Is that a kick drum, or the heavy palm of a hand striking the soundbox? This active engagement with the music, this continuous questioning of its origin, is the defining trait of BOHÈME. It is not passive background music, but a demanding aural sculpture that requires the listener to participate in its own creation by accepting the unholy marriage of tradition and technology.
BOHÈME succeeds because the destruction is purposeful. Fusco uses the sonic dislocation to create emotional states, isolation, anxiety, and a hard-won sense of self-determination. The album’s success is measured not in its commercial appeal or its catchy hooks, but in the sheer weight of its artistic conviction. It is a work that asks what happens when this often calm and soothing instrument is tuned to the frequency of industrial collapse. The answer is a challenging, deeply rewarding, and powerfully non-conformist piece of contemporary sound art. Fusco and Rabaeus have created a definitive document on the possibilities of limited instrumentation, proving that true innovation often stems from accepting a boundary only to then devote every available resource to violently transgressing it. They have taken the harp out of the concert hall and placed it squarely in the laboratory of modern sound, demanding that we rethink not only the instrument’s purpose, but our own ingrained, conventional listening habits. BOHÈME is a definitive argument for creative independence, perfectly encapsulating the spirit of its title. Head to Kety Fusco’s Bandcamp for more information.
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