Alessandro Bosetti: Didone

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.

Didone is an androgynous character that Bosetti created as part of a residency at the Centro Musica, Modena, Italy, commissioned by composer and curator Riccardo La Foresta. With Bosetti, process is always paramount. Here, he interviewed musicians, gathering their life stories, then boiled them down into 84 aphorisms, six of which are heard here. The recording features the soprano voice of Giulia Zaniboni throughout.

Unlike other recordings where Bosetti recontextualizes spoken word, here the words are sung. The story of Didone is slowly revealed as if Didone's body is growing more complex as the recording proceeds. The simple opening "E5 (Didone)" with voice, guitar, slight percussion, and ghostly saxophone grows into the percussive group chanting of "D16 (Un rapporto lineare) II" to the fun house opera "C14 (Problemi di droga)," and the finale "A 13 (Cos'è un suono bello)," (translation "What is a beautiful sound") a musical collage that conjures a trance-like state, with voice and electro-acoustic effects. Didone is yet another enigmatic masterpiece by maestro Bosetti.