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Alessandro Bosetti
Alessandro Bosetti's Music of Language
by Mark Corroto
The Milan-born, Marsailles resident Alessandro Bosetti may have started as a saxophonist and member of the influential free improvisation group Phosphor, but he has morphed into a composer and sound artist. Working solo, or with Kenta Nagai and Tony Buck in Trophies, he concentrated on the musicality of language and individual voices. His investigations drill down into the near-atomic level of speech, quite often utilizing fragments of verbal communication as repetitive building blocks. He also might repeat a word, a ...
read moreAlessandro Bosetti: Didone
by Mark Corroto
For the past twenty years or so, Alessandro Bosetti's music has been connected to art. Sure, music is an art form, but his music is more like sculpture. Whether his source materials are radio broadcasts, spoken words, or field recordings, he repurposes sound as objects. These building blocks are recast into new forms. Think of Picasso combining a bicycle saddle and handlebars, and turning them into a bull's head, or even subsequent reinterpretations of Marcel Duchamp's readymade urinal.
read moreAlessandro Bosetti: The Notebooks
by Mark Corroto
Listening to the work of Alessandro Bosetti reminds me of a friend I have who suffered a lengthy bout with sleeplessness. It wasn't so much the insomnia that tormented him but a pop song (specifically Engelbert Humperdinck's version of Quando, Quando, Quando") that was stuck in his head. Playing on an endless loop, he feared psychosis. Night after night he returned to his bed to find Humperdinck and that Italian pop song. A simple melody took on immense power. Like ...
read moreAlessandro Bosetti: Stille Post (Radio Works: 2003-2011)
by Mark Corroto
Do you agree with Alessandro Bosetti, that there is art everywhere? A buena vista is a painting waiting to happen, the music of the wind through a stand of conifers, and even the familiar subway stops as they come past are a sort of poetry. The conductor calls out, Montrose, Irving Park, Addison, Belmont, California, Western, Damen, Division...," and even though it's just information to other riders, you hear his song. Bosetti has been tuned into the musicality of spoken ...
read moreThe Trophies: You Wait To Publish
by Mark Corroto
Alessandro Bosetti reshuffles the distinctions between speech and song with his repeating texts. His scripts of found words, nonsense passages, or snippets of conversations, when presented as a loop, take on new and disparate meanings. With his trio Trophies, the repetitive speech loops expand as drummer Tony Buck (The Necks) and guitarist Kenta Nagai (Laura Andel Orchestra) 'speak' instrumental lines into the vortex of Bosetti's loops. You Wait To Publish follows A Color Of A Horse (D.S. al ...
read moreAlessandro Bosetti: Royals
by Mark Corroto
Musician/sound artist Alessandro Bosetti continues to explore the connection between speech and music, with yet another set of speech loop recordings. On Royals, like on his previous discs--Her Name (Crouton, 2007) and Exposé (Die Schachtel, 2007)--he orchestrates the tone, pitch and cadence of a speaker, talking or reading text. Much like pianist Jason Moran or drummer Dan Weiss' experiments with the articulation of telephone calls or movie scenes, Bosetti begins each of the three tracks with spoken language. ...
read moreAlessandro Bosetti: Expos
by Mark Corroto
Music is a language. Sure, but there is also the music of spoken language. Both communicate. But beneath each, at perhaps the cellular (or bit rate) level, there is an entire universe of activity that goes unnoticed by people in conversation or during music listening.Composer, artist and musician Alessandro Bosetti, born in Milan, has been investigating this subterranean crossroads of speech and sound lately. His last project Her Name (Crouton Music, 2007), is an orchestration of found voices ...
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