Alessandro Bosetti: Expos

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 recontexualized as sound communication instead of language.

This disc is a continuation of Bosetti's ongoing process works with repeated texts, spoken in English by Audrey Chen. Once again he orchestrates the pace and pitch of the speaker's voice floating instrumental and microtonal variations around and through the presentation. The three pieces were part of 33 pieces Bosetti presented at the O'Artoteca art gallery in Milan, along with printed and framed art in an installation.

Each of the three tracks loops the spoken words in a numbing endlessness. For instance the opening "Exposé #11 presents this statement: "Make videos of people singing a single long fixed note while a stream of water is squirted into their mouths. The video portrays the people in profile. You only see the persons open mouth and the stream of water. You don't understand where the stream is coming from. You make various videos in which different people sing different notes to show later on different monitors in the same room. The sound of the different notes ends up being harmonious.

This seemingly nonsense statement takes on different meaning, emotion, form while under the microscope of Bosetti. He accompanies the voice, queuing you to different words, only to pull those ques away later on. His subtle orchestration and introduction of different pitches, tones and hypnotic lines illustrates the story behind the story that is written at the subatomic level of all music and speech.