Behind the Scenes with Alessandro Bosetti, producer of African Feedback

Interview conducted by Julie Shapiro and Delaney Hall

Bosetti traveled around West African villages between Mali and Burkina Faso. He brought along a dozen cds filled with experimental, electro-acoustic and improvised music. Bosetti played the music for the villagers through headphones and recorded all of their responses, including comments, imitations and silences. African Feedback is the resulting composition, made entirely from the recordings and interviews he collected.]

> Let's start by talking about African Feedback in a general sense. How did the compostition come together? How did you make decisions about structure, rhythm and the basic sound of the piece?

Unlike all my other pieces, the structure of African Feedback is chronological. This means that its parts were composed in the order you hear them. This is a project without "one" answer. For me, it was a process of arriving in Africa with many expectations and projections, becoming freaked out, becoming influenced, listening to a lot of unrelated and exciting feedback, coming back to Europe completely disoriented and observing the experience becoming memory and being unable to draw conclusions. My approach changed during the composition process; it was not fixed in an aesthetic uniformity.
The piece sounds often really acoustic since there has been a lot of work in arranging the spoken materials and integrating them with instrumental parts. I dubbed many spoken parts with piano and percussion and combined a lot of it with my voice. All intrumental parts are built up note for note following a somehow maniacal and meticulous approach coming from the electro-acoustic compositional practice.
There is relatively little electronic processing in the piece. I've told myself that if I have the choice between processing a sound with my computer or to obtain the same effect by acoustic means, I will always go for the acoustic. I will, for example, build up overdubbed choruses with my voice, instead of using a harmonizer or ask a friend to borrow his harpsichord instead of using a plug-in to get the same sound. I need to get out of my room, do some physical activity. After all, I don't really care if I'm a beginner in most of the techniques I use. Therefore, I feel free to use many different tools and instruments at a time, often building up my instrumentarium from scratch.
My criteria is always just "making the music I'd like to listen to, the music I like," and I look for practical strategies to work on my taste, my instinct and my capability to make decisions in a deeper way and to take myself somewhere else without conceptualizing or analyzing too much.

> In notes accompanying the transcript of your interviews you note that no one asked you "Why are you doing this work," and that this frustrated you. So...Why did you do this work? Why did you travel to western Africa to gather responses to experimental music?

I wanted to collect material in order to make a new piece of music that was "african feedback" itself. This was somehow a twisted strategy to branch out from familiar habits and challenge my musical world. I wasn't looking for specific answers. I'm not an anthropologist - if I was, the work should have been framed in a completely different way and with a different method. I just put into place an interaction and this interaction was probably a sort of live performance of the piece.> How did you decide specifically on which cds to use in the project beyond the fact that they were among your favorites?I have my own itineraries that most of the time don't match the choice of critics and compilers. So it was a quick and emotional pick, stuff i have always referred to as my "foundations", even if in some cases I realized that I've been talking about some cds for years but haven't listened to them in a long time. I probably learned to be more direct with myself in terms of what I like and what I don't, and sold lots of cds from my collection after this project. Analytical judgement can eventually drive a musician crazy and alienate him from the simple pleasure of listening.

[Ed.: Some of the musicians whose work Bosetti took with him to Africa were: Robert Ashley, Henry Chopin, Keiji Haino, Lionel Marchetti, Steve Lacy and Harry Partch. He also played some of his own work.]

> And of all places in the world you could have gone, why did you choose Mali and Burkina Faso?

Yes, it's pretty random since i just wanted to "go beyond" the western network that usually consumes this kind of music. After all I guess I could have carried out the project not that far from home... But there's also a hidden reason that took me to a Dogon village. I thought I'd like to make a sort of parody of the experience the ethnologist Marcel Griaule had in the 1930s when he was allowed to listen to everything from the voice of an old hunter in Sangha to the whole "cosmology" of the Dogon people.This seemed to be a huge achievement for ethnology, and he then wrote a very famous book (Dieu D'eau). So I thought : "What would happen if I went there and did the reverse thing; take my personal cosmology and make it available for them ? Could be funny, or maybe they won't give a shit... "
It was a just a twisted game in my mind, but it moved me to go there. As you see I'm prone to little intellectual-analytical games even if i try to get rid of them....

> What's the most memorable response you got from someone who listened to your cds? Did anyone really _like_ what they heard?

Many and no one. The most interesting feedback was the really strange stories they told, ones that made me ask myself, "Where does it comes from?" Like for example - the story of the three men in the hospital.
There's much of that. I almost never got judgements. Maybe this guy they called "the philosopher" was the only one that told me: "Please stop it, it bothers me, I don't want to listen further." He was the first one to say that and the last one I interviewed in a month. I was somehow waiting for that answer and at that point i told myself : "Ok, I can stop now".

> How were the villagers compensated for taking part in the AF project?

Compensation is a big theme with the project... a never-ending theme considering the huge difference between Western and African economies. I started with the idea of not wanting to pay anything since, fair or not, I think that this kind of interaction should be free from any economic interest. People only talked and recorded with me if they wanted to. They were not asked to do any "work" or reach any "goal," they could say what they wanted or drop off the conversation if they liked. I also never had any expectations regarding what thay should have said or done. Nevertheless, everywhere I was asked for "presents" so I gave what my guide/ interpreter/friend said was considered fair: something like $2 or some cola nuts or some chocolate each time. But It was so little, so ridiculous! I don't know if you should take it with irony or anger.
Also, my guides/ translators (Solo, Ana, Karim) got something like $20 per day from my pocket.
The question of payment remains open and somehow puzzling. When I went back to Africa this past April I took many cassettes of the piece with me. I'd planned to sell them in local markets for the usual African cassette price ($1 or $2) and then sell cassettes from the same edition in Europe for about $300 each and send the money back to Africa - to friends, to help humanitarian activity etc... - [I calculated that price out of the ratio between average income in Mail (300 euros a year) - and Germany (43,000 euros a year (!!))]
But once there I realized how it would be impossible for me, if I wanted to stay sane, to ask for money from African people in their markets. The role is so clear there - they are the ones asking for money from white people, not the other way around. So, another failure (or not...) and for now i'm just giving cassettes around as a present.

> What did you learn about the way music is heard and made in traditional African cultures? How does it differ from how the western world incorporates music into daily life?

Completely. Music has more of a social function [in Africa.] Therefore it is seldom that somebody says "This is beautiful" or "This is not" and tells you why. They most likely will say they like your music because they like you and they want to be on good terms with you. But that's not really the point. For the people I interviewed, music is not an "object", a "thing" or a phenomenon that you can evaluate, buy, judge, or analyze. It's rather a process, a collective groove, a living circumstance, a piece of identity, a vessel. Going back to memorable answers, probably the most memorable of all was from the old Ibe when I asked if a Bernard Parmegiani piece reminded him of a painting or a landscape. He said "This is neither like a painting nor a landscape, this is the reality of things that pass by." It was simply real for him, no matter how strange or unknown. It was not music, representation, art or whatever, it was simply the world. There's no "strange" for somebody living in a Dogon village, they come from the sky, believe their ancestors had been on the moon much before Americans and that if you shoot the president with a gun the bullet will simply bounce back. Why should a musique concrete piece sound strange? They assume it's simply real because they are listening to it.

> You mention also that the experience of listening to experimental western music wasn't a very emotional one for most of the Africans who participated. How about for you? Was the project more or less emotional than you expected?

Yes, I noticed that there seemed to be a total lack of surprise. Where I expected surprise, there was just the acceptance that the sound they were hearing existed. Everybody seemed to assume, very calmly, that if these sounds exist there must be a reason for that.
On the other side it was a very emotional experience for me. It turned me upside down in many deep ways, difficult to describe in an interview. There has been a lot of self-questioning since then and while I was there, even though I was surrounded by great people all the time, I also felt very alone in some ways. Music is not a universal language.

> Did the experience of making AF change the way you listen to experimental, electro-acoustic and improvised music?

Yes, and the way I act as a creator in this musical area. It probably made me more responsible towards the people I want to speak to, if this can still make sense in a globalized world where music circulates in complex networks beyond strict cultural definitions.
It also made me much more aware of music as a groove instead of as a syntax or structure. In other words: if you want to dance you don't care about the microstructure of one piece, or of single phrases - you just dance, experience a mood, feel part of it together with other people, get into the "groove."

> Much of your sound work is text-based, revolving around different languages and the musicality of speech. Why does this hold such interest for you?

It probably started ten years ago while trying to mediate a strong interest in literature and a relative lack of interest in singing. I'm fascinated by ways of using the spoken language as musical material - it's always so rich, and in all the languages!!! Eventually I realized how working with spoken language could also mean meeting and interacting with people, sculpting their voices through interaction, communication, misunderstanding and empathy.
Since I never wanted to lose "meaning" in order to use language as a purely abstract and phonetical palette, I prefer to explore the ambiguous line between music and language. I've found out there's no one "right" way to choose between the sound and the meaning of a word. Those are two things working together in such a deep way but at the same time belonging to really different realms. It's puzzling and exciting at the same time. And I was becoming more interested in singing in those days...

> Can you talk about "Zwolfzungen," another of your language-based radio projects?

Zwolfzungen is a commission from Deutschland Radio in Berlin. Every year they ask a sound artist to produce twelve 5 minute pieces (one a month.) I decided to work with the musicality of languages I don't understand. Since then I've been busy with Tagalog (Philippines), Japanese, Cherokee/Tsalagi, Zulu and Xhosa, El Silbo, Basque, Saurano (a medieval German dialect still spoken on Italian Alps), Mandarin Chinese and Dogon, of course. I'm getting pretty good at interviewing people whose language I don't understand, and pretending I understand it! The pieces that have already been broadcasted are online here.
Actually the twelfth piece was supposed to feature an invented language and I've decided to carry that out from radio voices. You know how when you listen to a shortwave radio with a very bad signal, you can hear somebody speaking but you don't understand what he says and you don't even get which language he speaks? I've got a collection of recordings of materials like that and have transcribed those voices. At least I transcribed what I thought I understood, which most of the time comes out as a sort of non-existent language that doesn't make sense. It's the language of radio somehow. The last installment of Zwolfzungen will be based on that.

A book/cd based on African Feedback is due out in late 2006 on Errant Bodies Press. The cd will feature the audio composition and the the book will include the transcript of  Bosetti's conversations with villagers about the cds they listened to, along with his comments and thoughts about their feedback and the project in general.

Here are a few excerpts from the transcript:

"There are sick people: one has cut his finger. Another his arm. Another his foot. They are at the hospital and they're talking about their bad luck. One says, 'Oh, I'm going to die.' And then he died. The one with the cut in his foot. The one with the cut on his finger lives. Thanks to god. He can go home. Bye Bye."

(Guno, listening to Bengt Emil Johnson, November 11, Ogol Da)

"Yes. There’s just a lot of noise. It’s making noise. This is something else? Ahh...this is different or something … and this is also different ... that too... now it’s like he’s … I’d say singing, in the shower! … that’s a scream, a scream. More screaming. It’s like someone is ... um ... it’s like they’re suffering ... you could say they’re trying to sing or maybe… it’s someone whispering ... is it the sound of a fool? … You could say it’s an animal that … here’s another noise... maybe a motorbike or car or airplane… (She laughs) ... maybe an airplane flying ... but in any case they’re all noises that I can’t make out … I can’t figure out what they are! This one ... you might say ... hmm ... I can’t identify it! I would say this one is an animal’s cry, like something breathing. It seems like it’s someone doing it with his or her mouth, “buuuhh” (She laughs)

[M.me Agathe Kabore, Ougadougou]

"An airplane flies. There’s a boat flooded with water. It didn’t sink; they brought it to the port. There are some people that are in the water, others that have been brought in from elsewhere, in a pirogue. The flying airplane takes their picture from up above. There are people in the water being eaten by fish.
There are some that remain there for three days. There are those who got out and others who remained in the water. And the fish ate them.
The plane that was up above filmed it and saw some people but didn’t see others. The airplane continues to fly around up there. The dead people were those who had a…
There’s something in the water that’s crying! He didn’t have anything to eat, and that’s why he’s crying! Look, here are the people in the water, even the water has changed color, in some places it’s red and in others white. Now the water’s making noise. The water increases, it rises and recedes. The wind has come up and it’s started to rain. The water rises still more! Even more than before! The rain starts to destroy the houses! Even the trees! You can’t see anything! The air is black! The wind and the rain are strong, you can’t see anything!
OK, thank you. (In English)"

[Soulemayne "Solo" Dolo, Ogol Leye]

"This is the wind in the fields. After they blocked the street, into the fields.
The street is barred but everything will go well if god wishes it.
The devils have barred the road, you have to pay with an animal and cut its throat in front of a fetish. A goat or a sheep. That’s what they’re talking about.
They’re talking. But I don’t understand what they’re saying.
If you want I can talk about what’s happening in my ears but I don’t know what kind of music this is."

[Yasera, Ogol Leye]. "