Label : Potlatch
Author : Strom (Alessandro Bosetti, Boris Baltschun, Serge Baghdassarians,
Michel Doneda)
Title : "Strom"
Format : CD
Strom documents a March 2004 performance
at Berlin’s Ausland venue by a quartet consisting of three Berlin-based
musicians – Baghdassarians on guitar and mixing desk, Baltschun
on sampler, and Bosetti on soprano saxophone – and a visiting
Frenchman, Doneda, on soprano and sopranino saxophones. Constructed
out of an array of hissing, rumbling and spluttering electronics and
respiring reeds, its seven tracks exemplify electro-acoustic improvisation
as a process of rebuilding the ship while it’s still at sea,
as the constant entrances, changes and exits from each individual
player create a collective kaleidoscopic flow of evolving juxtapositions.
Free from teleology and fixed pulse, the group’s collages of
organic breath and inorganic machine shift unpredictably but engrossingly
between urgent intensity and brooding quietude, and in general the
music possesses a propensity to both gross and subtle change that
pleasantly distinguishes it from the rather petrified nullifications
sometimes to be heard at the more "lowercase" end of the
musical spectrum. A pleasure to the attentive ear, this is an excellent
and strongly recommended disc.
Wayne Spencer, Paristransatlantic, January 2005
Label : Cretive
Sources
Author : Schwimmer (Alessandro Bosetti, Michael Griener, Michael Thieke,
Sabine Vogel)
Title : "7x4x7"
Format : CD
From the heart of Berlin's reductionist community comes Schwimmer,
a quartet comprising Alessandro Bosetti (soprano sax), Michael Thieke
(clarinet), Sabine Vogel (flute) and Michael Griener (percussion).
In recording 7x4x7, the group utilized an unusual method. To quote
Bosetti's sleeve notes: "a player (clarinettist Michael Thieke)
played and recorded a seven minute long solo. A second player overdubbed
a seven-minute long solo over this statement while listening to it.
A third musician overdubbed onto the two previous tracks a third segment
and so on in a chain reaction that leads to a longer structure (which
could be reconstructed by those willing to do so, through the amazingly
detailed graphic description on the CD jacket, an artwork in itself)".
The effect of this procedure is to destroy any element of contemporaneous
collective interaction; moreover, the task of ascertaining at any
given moment who is alive to whom and who is merely providing a backing
track surely imposes too great a cognitive burden to be compatible
with enjoyment of the music. In consequence, the listener must abandon
any hope of detecting and appreciating any substantive element of
ongoing group interchange and collaboration and turn instead to the
work as a mere sonic artifact. It's something of a surprise to find
that the sound object so laboriously constructed rather resembles
that of an ordinary improvisation (except, of course, without any
element of extemporaneous collective engagement to be entered into
by the listener). The sleeve notes indicate that the work was intended
to explore the musical dimension of space by means of both the recording
method plus "close miking, multiple miking, spreading many loudspeakers
throughout the room [and] the virtuoso and massive use of noise and
extended techniques", but none of this succeeds in opening interesting
spatial dimensions within the recording. The reductionist vocabulary
of exhalations, flutters, scrapes, etc. is duly employed in various
combinations and densities, but what emerges seems uninspired, stilted
and somewhat rambling. It also on occasions falls back into arrangements
that resemble the quieter end of 1970s groups such as the Spontaneous
Music Ensemble. […] Wayne Spencer (Paris Transatlantic)
Label : Grob
Author : Alessandro Bosetti, Annette Krebs
Title : "S/T"
Format : CD
"Krebs and Bosetti are among some of the most exciting musicians from Berlin, both have long been well-known in international circles. Annette Krebs, who plays an electro-acoustically prepared classical guitar, belongs on an equal basis with improvisers (and composers) such as Andrea Neumann, Taku Sugimoto, Toshimaru Nakemura or Axel Dˆrner, with whom she has worked with, she belongs in a category of those musicians who have expanded the concept of improvisation beyond Free Jazz, Post-Serialism or the "English School" in the last few years. Stillness, minimalism, noise (but the later is not meant in the sense of a racket, but as a kind of unmediated sound), rustling, consciousness of structure and spontaneity, all of these experience a new value through these musicians - above all through Annette Krebs' way of playing the guitar. The saxophone player Alessandro Bosetti has also devoted himself to a radical noise-like way of playing, and yet one always senses how strongly he has been influenced by Steve Lacy and modern jazz of the 60's and 70's. In their duets, they do not, however, simply extend their work on noise. The music is formed by a pronounced sense of structure. They work on short units, with many pauses and stillness - but never for the sake of a pause (or stillness). Each pause has it exactly defined place in the dynamics of the music. Bosetti and Krebs savor monochrome tonal colors, research the gray behind the gray - and nonetheless this music is not monumental, not simply noise, not a hermetic block. It is a very exact, reflected music that never becomes overbearing or stiff. It has something casual, in the best sense of the word, it's non-ambitious. Although one really senses the work involved in it and necessary for it, the music remains unstrained, completely nonchalant and cool." Felix Klopotek, 2003.
Label : Potlatch
Author : Alessandro Bosetti, Bhob Rainey, Michel Doneda
Title : "Placés dans l'air"
Format : CD
Carried like a feather by the wind,
crushed by the pressure unmistakably present, this soprano saxophone
trio, sculptors of air columns, explorers of fullness, tamers of emptyness,
plunges us in the complex relationship of three poets of the breath.
It is recorded with a great attention by POB in a warehouse in Toulouse.
Doneda is also featured along with Alessandro Bosetti and Bhob Rainey
in a soprano sax summit of sorts on Placés dans l’air.
But, in the hands of these three, calling this a sax trio is quite
beside the point. This long, extended improvisation is more an expansive
sound painting in space. Doneda, Bosetti, and Rainey distill their
instruments down to the base parts; breath against reed, air vibrating
along a metallic bore, keypads
clattering against brass. Like the Doneda/Rowe/Leimgruber trio, the
trio eschews linear arcs and emphatic conversational interactions.
Instead they gradually choreograph a collective sound from microscopic
gestures and the sonic extremes of skirling overtones and barely audible
whispers. A sense of methodical collective searching slowly reveals
itself as the three layer shadowy timbres and oscillating harmonics
in the resonant room. The inside cover provides a stereoscopic photo
of the cavernous raw warehouse space where this was recorded, and
Pierre-Olivier Boulant’s “subjective stereophonic recording”
subtly separates the three voices to outline a sense of the room across
the stereo plane. Every subtle shading and nuance is captured effectively,
drawing the listener in to the fluidly evolving
improvisation. The three are masters of every manner of extended technique
so this could have easily become merely a catalog of advanced facility.
At
first, they seem to be cautiously circling each other to find a collective
center. But as the piece progresses, their voices coalesce as gradated
textures and spare gestures are passed around. And it is this depth
of sonic detail and sense of crystalline intent that carries the endeavor.
With these two new releases, Potlatch continues to carve a niche for
itself in championing the various fringes of European improvisation.
Michael Rosenstein, Signal To Noise / Summer 2003
Label : Nat
Nat
Author : Alessandro Bosetti, Guenter Christmann
Title : "Parla"
Format : 7 inches
Duo improvisations with soprano saxophone and cello. Recorded at Kesselhouse in Hannover.
Label : Nat
Nat
Author : Alessandro Bosetti, Annette Krebs
Title : "Paper Paper"
Format : 7 inches
Paper improvisations recorded in Berlin in 2001.
Label : Potlatch
Author : Phosphor (Burkhard Beins, Alessandro Bosetti, Axel Dörner,
Robin Hayward, Annette Krebs, Andrea Neumann, Michael Renkel, Ignaz
Schick)
Title : "Phosphor"
Format : CD
The eight-piece ensemble called Phosphor is something of a supergroup of Berlin-based improvisors of a generation born circa 1965. AMM is a likely reference-point, but I’m mostly struck by the contrasts between their aesthetics: Phosphor’s concentration on sound-as-event and on noise eliminates the processual, poetic quality of an AMM performance, in favour of a bleak and arbitrary soundworld largely defined by the shifting balance of static, held sounds and arbitrary, puncturing interventions. Even by the trompe l’oeil standards of free-improv, it’s remarkably hard to tell at any given moment how many people are playing and what instruments they’re using. Trumpeter Axel Dörner is already legendary for this kind of sonic extremism, and indeed there’s not a single sound on the album I can assign to him with any certainty. Presumably, like soprano saxophonist Alessandro Bosetti and tuba-player Robin Hayward, he is responsible for the stretches that sound like a gas leak or the workings of a furnace or boiler-room. (The other players are: Burkhard Beins, percussion; Annette Krebs and Michael Renkel, guitars; Andrea Neumann, “inside-piano, mixing desk” – the former, I gather, is the disassembled innards of a piano; and Ignaz Schick, electronics.) Nate Dorward l Coda l July 2002
Label : Fringes
Author : Alessandro Bosetti, Peter Kowald
Title : "Postura"
Format : LP, colored vinyl
Alessandro Bosetti, soprano saxoophone;
Peter Kowald, double bass, voice. Also on 6-7-8 : Astrid Weins, double
bass; Luigi Mosso, double bass, voice.
Side a:
1. Stare
2. Fatto
3. Spina
4. Midollo
5. Sbalzato
Side b:
6. Postura
7. Centrale
8. Arco
9. Battente
Recorded on 31 August 1999 at Modena.
Front cover (reproduced above) drawings by Helena.
Released in an edition of 450 copies with printed chipboard covers,
and trasparent-brown vinyl.