Mask Mirror
A few months ago I wrote a note to myself :
"Try to create a mask that that doesn’t have anything to do with anything."
and kept wondering what that could mean until i started to imagine Mask/Mirror.
Mask/Mirror a sampler to process recordings of spoken language in real time.
The sampler follows both sound and meaning criteria in sorting, organizing and processing samples and in formulating utterances.
It is a software tool based on max/msp and a speech recognition software interacting with my own voice during performances. It's also a state of mind enabling expanded spoken and vocal improvisation, expanded communication and ecstasy.
It has been developed in collaboration with Harvestworks Digital Arts Center in New York and STEIM in Amsterdam.
Mask/Mirror has to do with virtually everything but at the same time it does not have anything special to do with anything special.
As well as being a blank mask I can put on my face - and my voice - it's also a mirror that let me browse and talk to my memory while I am watching into it.
All mirrors are masks and vice versa. Both are tools enabling identity.

"It is difficult not to treat Mask Mirror, with its randomized garble of words, as a willfully cryptic Oracle of Delphi reincarnated as an Apple laptop. While Bosetti had described the project as "about the aboutness of being about" what Noise got out all of this is that it's devilishly hard not to seek meaning even where it's clear none is forthcoming. Not until the program, in a moment of absurd hilarity, spit forth the word "hamburgers" did it all click: Mask Mirror is a tool for shearing all meaning from language. It's a liberation, of sorts, like the sound version of Rorschach tests: The mind is encouraged to wander freely and delight in words purely for their sound. In the information overload of contemporary times, Mask Mirror's playful rupturing of sense--its nonsense, in other words--is a welcome respite." Raven Baker - Noise/Citypaper

her name - solo voice and laptop
voice and laptop solo has been the main live setting in ab's past two years tours. some of those materials have been recently released on crouton music.
"What I do could be roughly reminiscent of songs. Kind of almost spoken, abstract songs.
Maybe it’s just their duration that make them song-like, maybe they are just "pieces." Maybe they are not songs at all.
I usually use my voice and a laptop, and then project the sound produced around the audience.
During the concert I wear headphones. I consider headphones very poetic objects. I receive signals through the headphones and I try to react to them. Often I misunderstand them. Often I can't really control what I sing because the headphones separate me from the environment.
I sing—as an untrained, passionate singer—and I speak—I don’t play the saxophone here, for anybody who might ask.
I'm sorry I can't (and don't want to) provide a more conceptual framework for this project.
It's not a "project" as much as it is a live performance, changing every evening, though still featuring a lot of hidden conceptual issues—as everything does, especially for those who might ask.
Voice, language, misunderstandings, sound-anthropology, relational aesthetics, tone languages, conversations, headphones, geography, unspoken languages, feedback (in behaviour and physics), interview, no-control, handicap, imitation or mimetic behaviour are all favourite themes for me. They are all somehow there.
I make music out of conversations, conversations that I’ve had, and I make music out of them. It's the people I’ve met.
Often they were wearing headphones and I was having them listen to something. When it’s taking place you are not listening with them because of the headphones that cut you out. But you can listen to their reactions. They often misunderstand too. That's OK for me."

The Pool and the Soup.
A set of rules for spoken improvisation.
By Alessandro Bosetti. © 2007

An ongoing research project on spoken imprvisation. The project will have it's premeire at the festival "maulwerker performing music" at Berlin venue Tesla in september '07 and has been perfromed several times by differennt ensebles in Germany and the US since then. ...The piece is based on spoken improvisation guided by a conductor through a pool of instructions.
The piece can be played by any number of people starting from 2. I recommend a group of about 8 to 15 people.
All instruction could also given by anybody in the ensemble at any time, my experience though is that it works better when the prompter leads most of the time. There could also be an agreement in rotating the conductor role during the piece. This is up to the ensemble.
Instructions are given through gestures and are valid until a new instruction comes.
Before any instruction is given the conductor has to point out with a finger all the player that will be involved.
Many different combinations of instruction could be used at the same time. The conductor can experiment with them....
See video, Download the score here

 

 

atlas
atlas is the duo collaboration af alessandro bosetti and audrey chen, that has been touring extensively in the us, china, japan and taiwan in the summer/winter 2006. violently expressive and free in every form the duo moves among noise music, minimal performance and melodic expressionism. bosetti plays saxophone, electronics and voice while audrey chen is on her trusty "fourses", a chaos based analog synthetizer/circuit bending machine built by Baltimore's Peter B, voice and cello. The duo is currently working on many hours of recordings made at EMS studio in Stockholm in october 2006.

strom
Serge Baghdassarians / Boris Baltschun / Alessandro Bosetti / Michel Doneda
Boris Baltschun and Serge Baghdassarians join soprano saxophonists Alessandro Bosetti and Michel Doneda here for some very freaky textural improvisation. Baltschun and Baghdassarians play sampler and mixing desk, respectively (Baghdassarians is also credited with guitar, but only a few sounds are recognizable as a guitar), which might lead you to believe that the electronics and saxophones are pitted against one another somehow. But the saxophones can only be distinguished from the electronics with very close listening, and all the instruments sound like muffled screams, busted vacuum cleaners and tests of the emergency broadcast system.
Baltschun and Baghdassarians, who also often record and perform together as a duo, both have a knack for improvising electronic sounds that change frequently without losing attention to detail. (Baltschun also demonstrated these abilities on 2004’s excellent No Furniture with Axel Dörner and Kai Fagaschinski.) The electronics on Strom also manage to sound less than pristine, in the sense that they sometimes sound as if they might be created by breath through a tube. Baltschun and Baghdassarians therefore match up nicely with Bosetti and Doneda.
These players’ attempts to obscure the ‘natural’ sounds of their instruments, along with the way the structures of these pieces are marked by changes in the group’s overlapping textures, place these players in the same ballpark as Bhob Rainey, Urs Leimgruber, Axel Dörner and Keith Rowe. Within that context, the most important characteristics of Strom are its production and intensity.
Bosetti and Doneda recently recorded together on another Potlatch release, 2003’s Placés dans l'Air with fellow saxophonist Rainey, and like that album, Strom manages to capture the sounds of the room in which it was recorded while still sounding like the microphones were positioned very close to the players. Bosetti and Doneda aren’t playing somewhere across the distance of a concert hall, they’re buzzing right in your ear while you’re all sitting in a cave, which makes their saxophones sound larger than life and often downright scary.
Strom is a very anxious-sounding and often frightening record, especially when it's loud. It also stands out even among these fine players’ catalogs, which is to say that it’s very, very good.
Charlie Wilmoth Dusted Magazine January 2005