Marcela Lucatelli

The winner of ‘Vocal Jazz Release of the Year’ has delivered a deeply original and intelligently produced release that perfectly stages the beautiful vocal work. The artist possesses a mental and musical surplus, which is reflected in a cross-field of punk and noise with a touch of humor. The vocal technique is sovereign and the artist has catapulted herself into the international stratosphere with a superior artistic performance.

Danish Music Awards Jazz 2023 on Marcela Lucatelli's Necromancy

The Brazilian-born singer, composer and director Marcela Lucatelli has lived in Denmark since 2005. She is a punk performance artist with a startlingly raspy vocal. Lucatelli is both activist and academic in her compositions, and once you’ve heard her sing, you won’t forget it in a hurry. Her vocal delivery is demonstratively emotional and bombastic; mostly desperate. She coughs and rasps like she is possessed, as if her body is in the process of warring and fighting her own voice from within. Necromancy consists of ten tracks, all thematically revolving around an Afro-Brazilian cosmology of death drawn from the Yoruba people. It is a punky and rocking free jazz improvisation on the way to gloomy noise. Lucatelli sings in both Portuguese, Yoruba and the unique language she has developed her voice to master. It is a language with an extensive vocabulary of sounds such as gurgling, smacking, snarling, screeching, hissing, rumbling, squealing; a mass, excessive aspiration and diabolical Dadaism.

Louise Rosengreen for Information (DAN)

If there's one thing composer and vocalist Marcela Lucatelli cultivates, it's the endlessly ambiguous. I think about it every time I hear her sing: Is she a slave to the song? Is she trapped in it and struggling to get out again? Is she in a romantic, perhaps erotic relationship with it? Is she trying to kill it? Or is she a kind of Jeanne d’Arc of the song, standing before it with sword and shield to protect it from enemies? It's impossible to say, but the ambiguity – or even: the indistinctness – is the constant anchor that holds me and makes me listen again and again. This also applies to the new album, Necromancy, a song cycle of ten songs, each dedicated to an orisha from the Afro-Brazilian Yoruba religion, and where Lucatelli has teamed up with guitarist Lars Bech Pilgaard and percussionist Anders Vestegaard. The result is Lucatelli's best album to date – a small masterpiece, I'm tempted to call it – where the three musicians, with a mixture of compositional elegance and punk devilish savagery, combine a form of noisy, psychedelic rock music with ritualistic polyrhythms, a free-jazz musical language, synth layers, there's something out of a 70s b-horror movie, and an energy that's almost funky in a totally dirty Betty Davis-esque way. It is in the meeting between the physicality of the music and the spiritual aura that the magic occurs. And then there is Lucatelli's voice, which must be mentioned even though it is beyond what can be described in the linguistic order. Fumbling, I feel like trying the math (the famous formula i2 = −1 must be used to describe the complexity) or a series of enthusiastic exclamation marks (!!!!!!!).

Rasmus Weirup for SEISMOGRAF (DAN)

Released during 2017, her album PHEW! - The Last Guide for a Western Obituary revealed her vocal splendours in all their glory. Lessons about extended vocal techniques from the likes of Phil Minton, Maggie Nicols and Jaap Blonk duly learnt, Lucatelli sounds like none of them as she shrieks and roars and squeaks and squeals in tongues over Marcio Gibson’s drums and Marcos Campello’s guitar. But listening to one of her fully notated scores, such as The Golden Days, written for DR VokalEnsemblet in 2018 you realise how deftly and skilfully she can coerce conventional notation into exhibiting equivalent freedoms. 

Philip Clark for THE WIRE (ENG)

Could it get any wilder? Easily. A few days later, the Danish-Brazilian composer Marcela Lucatelli transformed the old tram depot Volume on Enghavevej into a chaotic S/M orgy with her outrageous catwalk-opera Die a Happy Man. At the front was the raw-nerved engaging and increasingly undressed tenor Mathias Monrad Møller. He sang about feeling connected to the world through porn and lived through an hour and a half of absurd dream visions on the long stage. A string quintet leaping out of red boilersuits; a bantering dancer in a gold costume and his co-conspirator, a mockingbird in green-brown plumage, who physically attacked Møller several times; and a composer who stepped forward from her keyboard in red latex and bathed the tenor in mud and skimmed milk. Everything was at stake, one sensed, everything could be done. What was a human being? Who had power over whom? Die a Happy Man asked academic questions on a level so that even an audience full of cultural scholars had difficulty finding their way into the logic. The music bounced between chaotic improvisation and South American carnival atmosphere as musicians and performers meandered around the room. In her preface to the opera, Lucatelli herself had emphasized understanding the work as a counterfactual narrative about colonialism. A Europe colonized by the people of the rainforest, a reversal of history. I heard afterwards many suggestions for readings that leaned on this one, but also others that were quite different. Lucatelli's opera was so full of impressions, so unbridled, that many possibilities opened up. Some were directly disgusted by the chaotic and exhibitionist style, others – including me – smiled widely at having been enriched with so many uncompromising expressions at once. Nor did this feel particularly familiar on the Danish opera scene; Lucatelli drew up an artistic perimeter that was probably opaque in its anarchy, but also vigorous in its playful rage.

Sune Anderberg on Copenhagen Opera Festival 2022 for ISCENE (DAN)

That was pretty avant-garde wasn’t it? What an amazing piece of work from this swaggering vocalist and composer who packs quite a punch.

Max Reinhardt on PHEW! for BBC Radio 3's Late Junction

A new standard in Danish opera is simply being set here, one could well state it. Not as such in a musical sense, where the shifting style played a more dramatic than rigorous role: one moment baroque pastiche and instrumental theater, the next South American carnival drum and razor-sharp synthesizer. But as a performance, as an effort, what Møller allowed himself to be exposed to during his hour and a half on stage in Volume was unique. Humiliation, assault, nudity – a total breakdown and rebirth that culminated when Lucatelli stepped forward from her keyboard into a red mud pool and bathed him in mud and cow milk. So you can say what you want about Lucatelli's amok maximalism - and I have paid attention to a comment or two over time - but virtually every time she writes or designs a new work, she expands the room for maneuver for classical music at home. Yes, it most often looks and sounds like a door being kicked in, but that’s what it is too. It is aesthetic and political activism with an academic superstructure, and although one could well leave Die a Happy Man with the feeling of having been examined in postcolonial theory without knowing the syllabus, there was also an abundance of more immediate expressions to lose oneself in: a string quintet breaking out of big boiler suits and roaming around; poetically charged moments where Mathias Monrad Møller almost went into reverse and transformed the tangle on stage into restrained energy; the band with two drum kits dancing to its own party in spacesuits; and the two gifted babbling humorous roles on stage, especially the dancer Lewys Holt, who supplemented his assaults on Møller with biting sarcasm and lyrical choreography.

Sune Anderberg on What just happened there - has opera become hip? for Seismograf (DAN)

One of the definitive highlights of Byhaven’s open-air program was the show by the trio EHM. EHM’s performance is grounded in Marcela Lucatelli’s dramatic vocal stunts and imposing stage presence, as well as in Erik Kimestad Pedersen’s and Henrik Olsson’s intriguing trumpet and guitar work. At some point, I noticed a group of teenagers hesitantly entering the Byhaven yard with their mouths agape… Which is, frankly, how one should enter a good avant-garde concert. It was definitely not your usual easy-listening, afternoon concert material, but that only made it more exciting.

Ivna Franic on Copenhagen Jazz Festival 2022 for Forkert (ENG)

So something had to happen, and it certainly did. For after Apokidis followed the premiere of Marcela Lucatelli's long awaited RGBW. The work was, under great uproar, postponed by DR in 2020 due to "technical performance problems". Damn it: RGBW is one big technical performance problem. Over-geared riots, a tangle of tones and furious strings ushered in the work. But it quickly turned into demonstrative simplicity: one repeated note in the piano. Halfway through, Lucatelli made her entrance in a white LED costume, illuminated in all the colors of the rainbow. "Come on," she hissed, before a tumultuous duet for orchestra and growling caterwaul vocals set in motion. When you did not curly your toes, you laughed. Over the comic timing, the overpowered orchestral expression, but also over the historical consciousness, over the work's discussion with its own family tree. Was ‘RGBW’ as flabby as some had feared, others hoped? Yes. To an extent, several of the musicians in the orchestra looked decidedly glum afterwards. Lucatelli's vocal virtuoso and raving freestyle might have seemed a little fuzzy. But sharpness was not the goal. What exactly was the goal? Well. At the back of the orchestra, percussionist Gert Sørensen finally stood wearing a hat with banana and lemons, smiling big. When was the last time you saw such a spectacle at a symphonic concert?

Sune Anderberg for Klassisk (DAN)

The Brazilian composer, director, vocalist and performance artist Marcela Lucatelli was even on stage in a half-mad performance wearing a wild suit of LED lights with grunting, incomprehensible speech-singing. The work RGBW some may remember from the mini-scandal in 2019, where it was peeled off the poster because the orchestra thought that it was not good enough from a purely technico-notational point of view to be played. Maybe they also thought that her piece was too silly for a serious orchestra - now that it had been revised and obviously could easily be played, the musicians still looked moderately satisfied. The three pieces showed plenty of potential, and with Lucatelli's perhaps-perhaps not ironic punk attitude, the audience went on break smiling.

Henrik Friis for Politiken (DAN)

Marcela Lucatelli points to classical music aesthetics from the inside and the outside when, through a lecture performance and a series of essays, she wants to challenge the Western understanding of the Beautiful and the Sublime. Here, the two concepts are presented as an example of a dominant thought pattern that has come about at the expense of other marginalized knowledge systems. Starting from African American and Native American ways of thinking, Marcela Lucatelli examines how alternative, decolonial compositional strategies can open our perception towards a new, intercultural epistemic experience within new music.

Danish Composers’ Society on Lucatelli's New Paths grant (DAN)

Her style is at the same time totally self-delivering as with the most daring autofiction writers and fierce as the most exhibitionistic fourth-wave feminists. (...) Her forceful will to expose herself appears both as infantile and powerful, it cleverly puts her paradoxical virtuoso, dadaistic vocal in check, so it does not become a showoff. Where other composers storm the scene to add the music to a de-professionalized twitch, Lucatelli appears with her convincing technique and natural stage presence as an authority. She gives the whole environment around the young composers an outgoing energy, which has not been seen before. The great quake has so much materialized in her works and makes an impression on the surroundings. Here's a new direction to search, new impulses to embed in the music concept.

Sune Anderberg for SEISMOGRAF (DAN)

To regard it as simply a critical comment upon the state of our lives in our technology-saturated society would be to impose an alienating logic upon the music that fails to fully engage with the happenstance of how all its constituent parts came together. And doing so would also neglect how, throughout her oeuvre, Lucatelli has shown herself to be much more than just a critic of the world before her but also an empathetic and engaged listener to the hum of human and non-human foibles alike. (…) With her capacity to draw out these complex characters and highlight their absurdities in only a few moments, the most fascinating thing about Lucatelli’s new record is where it places structure, which sounds like a hopelessly technical reading but it is actually what makes it super exciting. Because these personas imply worlds within which they fit or don’t, with systems of control and liberation and the narratives of lives lived well, or just lived in the face of no other options. 

Macon Holt on ANEW for Passive/Aggressive (ENG)

Many of the lectures approached in their form performance art, and we thus found ourselves in the borderland between art and science, which turned out to be a most often deeply inspiring and enormously fruitful place to be. I often sat back after the lecture with an overwhelming desire to talk - and think - further. This is how I felt, for example, after the lecture with the Brazilian-born, Danish resident composer Marcela Lucatelli, who was the keynote speaker on the subject of "embodiment", but who in the best postmodernist, deconstructivist fashion slowly began to dismantle "embodiment" as a concept. For Lucatelli, the idea of embodiment was a product of an ancient Western fiction about the division between body and soul, which she advised us to do away with in favor of a cultivation of the connectedness between all bodies: »Find the self and kill it!« she shouted at one point in a voice that, during the course of the lecture - as if to illustrate the constant instability of the self - moved from the authoritative instance of the classical lecturer to opera and on to a Donald Duck rattle. The effect was powerful and thought-provoking.

Rasmus Weirup on I Am a Golden God and MINU_Festival 2022 for Seismograf (DAN)

Marcela is an extremely talented vocalist and performer herself, we have attended her own performances many times and always been in love with the way she manages to convey such a diverse and multifaceted artistic universe every time she takes the stage. We have been absorbed by this uncommon energy, a rare elegance that tries to push the barriers of the rational. Marcela is the demonstration that apparently different and distant worlds can coexist and dialogue with each other, that the sound material can be created, destroyed and reinvented again without having to respect a dogma or a precise rule. Performing a work by Marcela is a big challenge. One is led to work on one's own limits and weaknesses, elevating them to art. The Other Heading is a personal portrait of NEKO3 and allowed us to discover unknown sides of the ensemble, putting three very different personalities up on display. Working on the piece with its creator was for us among the first experiences of seeing the seemingly nonsensical gestures connected and not making sense, and still making sense.

Ensemble NEKO3 on working with Lucatelli for The Other Heading

“Stop writing music - hit it, hammer it, fuck it, whatever,” is shouted out in the hall. With wild gestures and a voice constantly changing from a deep growl to bright whine, Marcela Lucatelli delivers a broadside in all directions. The Danish-Brazilian composer is in the middle of the performance lecture The Music of Multiplicities: Decolonizing the Voice of Sublimity, where she strikes a blow for the antipuristic, the contradictory, the anti-intellectual, the seductive, the affective and the positive anger. The energy infects the entire Musikhuset's Lille Sal, draws us into a universe where inhibitions exist to be cast off. Although we laugh, Lucatelli punctures the compositional approach many of us are surrounded by. The classic approach, aiming for a clear whole, perpetuated through a bias towards newly printed sheet music. This is seduction, and seduction applies in new music as well. And after the break, shy spectators go up on stage. Everyone must participate, completely on their own terms, without instructions or pressure, in a quest to create imperfect things in and for the present. One stuffs paper into the ensemble NJYD's instruments, while a vacuum cleaner's hum infuses the audience, gently wandering around the stage. A composer lies down on the floor and shouts that he wants all the autographs all over his body; others are setting up a feedback network in front of the guitarist's amplifier. The absurd scenes develop into a series of primal screams, and for a while the audience seems to have forgotten the gap between work and listener. What exactly is this about? Lucatelli's many outbursts of liberation from the tradition create a mess in my brain that I do not know if I can or do not want to unravel.

Tobias Sejersdal on Ung Nordisk Musik 2021 for SEISMOGRAF (DAN)

The reincarnation of Cecil Taylor.

Heiner Goebbels (composer and director)

I will admit here right from the start that This Music is an Embarrassment to Humanity is the most absurd and provocative thing I have seen in a long time. In general, Sort/Hvid theater always surprises with their stagings, and this staging is no exception. Before entering the theater, I have no expectations for the play other than an excitement and curiosity to see what happens when you mix modern technology with the classics of the danish songbook. The stage is beautifully and lushly decorated with ferns and various other plants hanging from columns, which brings my thoughts back to ancient Greece. There is a delicious prehistoric energy on stage, which is, however, broken by a red inflatable chair on the right side, as well as a huge screen that towers in the background. On the screen, the audience is instructed to switch on their mobiles and go to a website, and soon after all the mobiles in the audience start playing idyllic bird whistles. This way of using mobile phones gives the performance an extra layer of sound, and it involves the audience in a brilliant and effective way. In addition, the scenography is really smart, and it perfectly illustrates the show's premise in the mix of the old and new decor. The music in the performance is absurd and strange, which provokes me to no end. And it provokes me even more that I am so provoked by it. There is no regular rhythm to the composition, apart from the few seconds when I can actually recognize which song is being interpreted, and that is exactly what frustrates me so much, because I find out how much I sit myself stuck in old traditions and ideas about how the songs should be sung. In addition, Marcela Lucatelli is just as annoying and provocative as she is captivating, because even though I sit with a lump in my stomach from irritation at the almost childish and arbitrary music, I can't help but be drawn to her. This Music is an Embarrassment to Humanity is not a performance I would like to see again, but at the same time I would not have been without this experience, as it has made me reflect on Danish society's inability to renew itself. Especially in the wake of the Corona situation, I have had a tendency to glorify Denmark and it is therefore refreshing to get Marcela Lucatelli's view of the country, as she has, after all, a different cultural background, and can therefore see the country's shortcomings more clearly.

Victoria Bjertnæs Maegaard for Den 4. Væg (DAN)

Then the stage was set for a hard-hitting and challenging set with the Copenhagen-based, Brazilian vocalist Marcela Lucatelli and the Norwegian drummer Ole Mofjell (…). I have heard the Brazilian vocalist several times before, and her stage appearance is completely unique and, probably, a bit intimidating for "newbies". She is a performance artist who howls and screams, drools and wrings the innermost parts of her soul out to the audience in a very fascinating way. And they start as if it were a scene from a Japanese horror film we were in. Her voice is powerful and pours out a stream of incomprehensible words and expressions that make us sit on the edge of our seats and pay close attention. She uses her whole body in her vocal art, and it is obvious that she twists her soul and makes it open to the public. It is frightening, fascinating and extremely exciting to follow her antics around the stage while she predicts doomsday, or worse, with clear messages. (…) This duo must be one of the fiercest things you've had on a jazz scene in Denmark since before the pandemic.

Jan Granlie for saltpeanuts* (NOR)

We were not allowed to turn off our cell phones, we were told as we were heading into the theater hall. They should be allowed to sound as they more often than not do, and it was liberating just to bring it into light, as it usually lies in the pocket - completely suppressed. Suddenly, there was baby cry sounding from the person sitting next to me. The sound of an audience's turned on mobile phones during This Music is an Embarrassment to Humanity could in itself have been a John Cage-like work, but we also had to log in to a page that orchestrated a larger sonic wallpaper, where the show's sounds came from ourselves while Brazilian performance artist Marcela Lucatelli sat behind the keys on stage playing and singing what was supposed to be songs from the Danish songbook exposed to artificial intelligence. Most of the pieces were as disharmonious as a meditation in hell, others were insanely catchy as hits from another galaxy where every note grew out of the present dictated by a machine. As a rule, one associates artificial intelligence in music with generic hit list logic and not avant-garde. This was an algorithm that would hurt the listener and, so to speak, short-circuit a collective Danish memory. Lucatelli apparently spontaneously took orders from the computer, which - unfortunately in an inexplicable way - generated the lyrics, "I'm part of a system", she sang while stock photo-like videos from ordinary life ran on a screen in the background. It was Lucatelli's superior improvisational artistry that lifted the performance, and there were people who walked out from the hall - perhaps because one did not know how to deal with the almost non-human expressiveness and fervor she seemed to channel as if the digital was flowing through the body, and some form of expurgation took place somewhere.

Alexander Vesterlund for Politiken (DAN)

When Marcela Lucatelli joins the trio, it gets wild. She uses not only her voice, but her whole body as an orchestra of different expressions. She sings and complains, cries, whispers, growls and uses plosives, throat sounds and small squeaks as self-interruptions and outbursts. It is a physical expression in which classical singing techniques are interrupted and almost parodied by bodily sounds. Techniques that Joan La Barbara explored in depth on the album Voice Is the Original Instrument in 1976, in fierce alternation with pompous singing. It is like an inner quarrel or an evocation of spirits. Powerful and unpretentious, beautiful and eerie. Lucatelli manipulates her own vocal expressions on a filter bank, which she twists the knobs around so that at times it looks as if she is being electrified by it. It could be reminiscent of a kind of possession by the spirits of Amy Camus and Diamanda Galás in Lucatelli's body emanating from the apparatus. The sonic characters who have taken over her are free to do whatever they want. And when you look around the audience, no one seems indifferent to what is happening on stage. The work, It Ain’t Easy but It Could Be Fun (2020), is anything but easy listening, but it is really fun. (...) There is no doubt that with SKLASH+ and in particular Lucatelli you are in the company of something completely new. Maybe hence the pleasure of experiencing her. Or perhaps the pleasure simply lies in the fact that she is a convincing artist who manages to equate temperaments and emotions that seem incongruent, and thus create new experiences outside the yet known.

Mathias Schønberg for SEISMOGRAF (DAN)

And one thing is certain: her vocal control and technique, combined with the inventiveness of her sonic movements, tempi and pronunciations, prove to be more versatile with each work.

Pérola Mathias for Resenhas Miúdas (POR)

Lucatelli is an abstract vocal artist who with suppressed screams, whine, rattle and gurgle presents an expression which I do not have experience with. She is also an actress, which is a clear point, when she is to be experienced live. The visual expression is both scary and breathtaking. It gives the extra dimension, where one as listener and viewer is blown away by wonder and admiration. (...) It's not music for many. There are many prejudices and ideas that you have to leave behind when you have such an experience. Wild!

Niels Overgård on EHM for JAZZNYT (DAN) 

The closest you get to the sound artist Lydia Lunch in Denmark. (…) A skilled vocalist, who really does something original with the music. And we look forward to hearing from her again.

Jan Granlie for salt-peanuts* (NOR)
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She carries the virus of freedom.

Bernardo Barros (composer)

Lucatelli’s Gesamtkunstwerk ISYCH, das Moment – or how to describe atomic habits romped through the academic, the popular, the cutting, the banal, the theatrical, the zoological (there was also a tortoise), the unfathomably brilliant, the obfuscatingly bizarre and the rib-ticklingly entertaining. It was both rollercoaster ride and ritual, whose organ prelude and interludes lodged it on the severe foundations of a Mass but whose recurring skits gave it the lightness of a summer review. (…) Beyond that streak of vulnerability Lucatelli can afford to be honest because she has so little to hide. (…) Mayhem? Yes. And a combination of fun and sincerity that is hard to come by.

Andrew Mellor for SEISMOGRAF (ENG/DAN)

I had seen Youtube videos floating around, but it wasn’t until I first saw Lucatelli at 5e’s Mandagklubben (a weekly free-jazz/improvisation night held in a small venue in Copenhagen’s meatpacking district) that I experienced the full force of her stage presence. Raw, animalistic, uncompromising; all these words are clichés when describing her work. Whenever I see her perform, I am struck by the vitality, even necessity, of what she does. It would be too simple to categorise it as avant-garde vocal performance art (‘crazy person makes crazy sounds’). Something else is happening, and I am determined to find out what it is. 

James Black for SEISMOGRAF (ENG/DAN)

In cooperation with Olsson and Kimestad, Lucatelli is also consistent and does not seek the limits, but goes far beyond them. She screams, pinks, grits and rattles. At no time does she sings or speaks. She twists and turns on the vocal cords. There is something tragicomic and scary about it. It works because nothing is taken into account. It is inhuman human noise.

Niels Overgård on EHM for JAZZNYT (DAN)

A constant explosion.

Jens Peter Møller (composer and bassist)

In an epoch characterized by rampant neoliberalism, global warming, and technological omnipresence, the work of Marcela Lucatelli violently embodies that which destabilizes the collective psyche. In her works’ aestheticization of the nonsensical, the chaotic, the undesirable and ugly, as well as the obscene, Lucatelli reveals (whether consciously or otherwise) how traditional aesthetics of the sublime and beautiful are inextricably linked with racial, gendered, and class oppression. Her appropriation of the everyday sludge—bordering on nightmarish in affect—not only represents an increasingly fractured sense of self and other, but also offers forth an alternative path towards an altered sublimity. At the forefront of this aesthetic reinvention is Lucatelli’s voice and body, which evince the collapse of an objective language, the failure of the individual voice, as well as the fetishization of the other corporeality. Within her sonic landscapes exist primal shrieks, grunts, and wails as well as the squeaks and thuds that emerge from everyday objects. These sounds hardly yield pleasing, or even sparkling results, ignoring the trends to prioritize certain resonances. Instead, her sounds—being fundamentally referential in nature—are uncompromisingly linked with banal physical materials, creating music out of unwanted and dejected noise. As such, rather than guiding the listener through an enticing listening experience, the music makes that which is taken for granted, or simply overlooked, unavoidably immediate. By utilizing dull sounds in a violent manner, these everyday thuds, wisps, taps, clicks, squeals, screams render an alienated listening experience, dispensing with soundings that elicit reactions of “cool”, “good”, or “neat.” Fortunately enough, the assertive nature of Lucatelli’s music holds promise for a new ethos beyond the limits of the everyday and the physical. 

Bethany Younge (composer-performer and music scholar)

Marcela Lucatelli's vocal mastery and how she manages to stroll through different musical worlds are both really impressive, improvising and deconstructing what we think we know and recognize.

Pérola Mathias (music journalist and curator)

The standout is Impossible Penetrations, a collaboration with vocalist and composer Marcela Lucatelli. It’s polymorphously perverse, a little scary, tender and very gross, involving fiddling with beads on sticks, jumping through hula hoops, and genderfuck costumes. Lucatelli’s breathless chorus of ‘’Happy, happy, happy Bad Things!’’ reaches a frenzy of helium menace as the four Bastard Assignments performers dance, uncomfortably linked within the hoops. The music is punctuated by one sided mobile phone calls and a scene resembling a cuddle puddle. At the end, the four performers fill their mouths with condiments – mustard, ketchup, Gatorade and squeezy mayonnaise – and I feel the urge to puke. Job well done. (…) Lucatelli reappears to perform Run Run Run, where she performs extended vocal technique takes on 12 characters, including a Jagger-esque rock star, a Rambo-style action hero complete with a fake muscle shirt, groupies, starlets, ventriloquists (with that aforementioned sex doll as a dummy) and ranting older ladies. As she changes outfits between acts, a pop song with the lyrics ‘‘Run Run Run’’ in the chorus plays. Her act is part Cindy Sherman, part Natasha Lyonne in Russian Doll in need of an exorcism – there are corpse growls and actual foaming at the mouth.

Emily Bick on SPOR Festival 2019 for THE WIRE (ENG)

The perfectionism closer to an angel.

Paul Schroeder (sound engineer at Klub Primi)

That some say that music and politics should not be mixed together, is the cleanest gibberish, when you hear Lucatelli. Her screams had so much anger, frustration, cursing and despair in themselves, that it could almost be too much of a good thing. But using different aids, she got the audience to sit spellbound on their skeletons. Her anger came out in the form of a primal scream in different manifestations, that hurt far into the spinal cord, and it's clear here that there is much life lived hidden under clothing.

Jan Granlie for salt peanuts* (NOR)

analysis #0.1 was performed by Lucatelli alone, who prefaced her performance with a brief introduction to the piece, which she had been recently developing inspired by the dynamics of a psychiatry interview. The performance was framed as her response to an imaginary(?) psychiatrist’s query, beginning with a hesitantly confessional tone (‘Well, it feels to me that…’) before suddenly descending into what can only be described as extremely extended vocal techniques. It is difficult to describe these sounds Lucatelli produced – imagine Cathy Berberian crossed with the frontman of Meshuggah for a start – but they were thoroughly virtuosic, fluctuating between disturbingly nonhuman and achingly delicate (it is, moreover, a considerable challenge to think of the sort of notation that might serve as a roadmap to these sounds). A somewhat literal interpretation would suggest that this was an attempt to reconcile our ways of processing very wrought, indescribably intense phenomena, sonic or otherwise, into a coherently communicable structure (e.g., an analysis). Again, this level of nuance and engagement might easily have been lost if the audience was not prepared for the performance, but this is precisely what Lucatelli’s introduction provided. (…) It was the most daring, inspired, and thoroughly enjoyable concert of the entire festival.

Max Erwin on Donaueschinger Musiktage 2017 for Tempo (ENG)

Diamanda Galas meets James Brown.

Stellan Veloce (composer-performer)

I want to start by making a point about Off-human’s politics. One didn't have to guess how this performance fit (or rather didn’t fit) into the hyper-serious social resistance compounded by the events of the past several weeks, not to mention years. Thousands, if not millions, of lives are placed in danger, a danger that continues to grow with each day of this presidency. How can anyone create art that thrives in this climate? Off-human makes no explicit rejection of this reality but still lands far outside of its realm, presupposing nonsense and bullshit as order. Marcela Lucatelli and MOCREP are at the frontline of this destabilisation by asserting their validity as humans, particularly if it may be slightly off-color. It's here, in a concurrent performance of resistance, that Off-human leaves its mark. The ethics at play are of sensuality and divinity, but there is no god -- only respect and accountability. This is what's at stake within the temporal and spatial bounds of Off-human: vulnerability in the hands of a mob, prostration at the foot of the observer. The present indulgence is in celebration of sociality -- this is the case for the participants as well as the audience.

Jen Hill for Cacophony (ENG)

The Brian Ferneyhough of ‘‘stuff’’.

Lester St.Louis (composer, cellist and curator)

With the Brazilian composer and performance artist Marcela Lucatelli there is always a surprise awaiting. Her works are often intense, beautifully confusing, psychedelic and wild.

AUT for [OpenScores] (DAN)

Marcela Lucatelli’s TUNING TIME was one of two pieces which, for me, seemed almost to make the whole festival collapse, by destabilising the assumptions which form its foundations. From the start the piece evaded any attempt to read it and categorise it. It invited us to see structures and frameworks, but refused to run its course in the way that we expected. At the same time, its ‘free’ elements were far from anarchic, and seemed carefully prescribed, albeit not according to the patterns initially suggested. The humour was intense, but very dry – not anarchic, but a parody of an expectation of anarchy. Here was a piece whose resistance was highly ‘situated’, and turned against its own context and audience. The listener, desperate to find value and meaning in every piece, is made aware of their own desire to understand and categorise a piece – to fit it into some sort of aesthetic logic – in order to judge it unequivocally. In refusing our attempts to do so, it challenges us to dismiss it, yet leaves us feeling uncomfortable. Obviously, this review is just such an example of an attempt to contain it, albeit as pure negation.

Thom Andrewes on Ung Nordisk Musik 2014 for the biting point (ENG)