Trophies - Become Objects of Daily Use

Label : Monotype
Release : 2011
Format : CD

Trophies is : 
Alessandro Bosetti - voice, electronics / Kenta Nagai - fretless guitar / Tony Buck - drums

" ... In an incomprehensible way – but seemingly driven by primal forces - the trio succeeds to hypnotize. The work is uncomfortable and complex, no comparison comes to mind. It is like the craving that is close to addiction. Yes, this music is thrilling, emotional and crushingly impressive."  Jan Willem Broek - Caleidoscoop

" …  Working musicians, performers and artists who never takes understanding for granted … Bosetti's trio shows us an unexpected way where both abstraction, absurdity and musical trance coexist. It's like Alfred Jarry was reading the local newspaper and got stuck among print errors. "  Thomas Millroth - Sound of Music. 

" ... Riddled with humor and playfulness … It's a sparkling coherent and precise album and makes for riveting listening as the changes are constant. They were on the ball during the recording; you need to be on the ball to listen." Hassni Malik - Progress Report

"Irregular rhythm, abstract texts and electronics configure an amazing and irreverent proposal which doesn't follow any musical trend."  Guillermo Escudero -Loop.cl

"Alessandro Bosetti is "gloriously repeating" … Bosetti's method - rapidly becoming a signature sound - is to map the musical profiles of spoken word, poetry, or his own non sequitur speech and transcribe the rhythms, pitch, and notes to be played and replayed as a continuous circle of sound". Mark Corotto  - All About Jazz

"If you’ve always enjoyed the muzzy feeling of bewilderment and wonder induced by the poetic genius of Mayo Thompson and his Red Krayola bands, this is the record for you." Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector. 

Trophies, the main live project of Alessandro Bosetti with fretless guitarist Kenta Nagai and drummer Tony Buck is entirely dedicated to Bosetti's loop compositions. Trophies's music is based upon two simple principles : it is derived from speech and repeats stubbornly.
Melodies are crafted out of speech profiles of recordings of Bosetti's emotional, often surreal or non-sequitur lyrics. Words are casted into everyday speech and subsequently transcribed and played as endless loops. Speech becomes song and the non-metric, irregular rhythms that it creates turn into powerful grooves and precise pulsations never lining up with any regular beat.
Trophies formed in 2009 when Bosetti was invited to be artist in residence at Teatro Fondamenta Nuove in Venice and to bring together his own ensemble. It since then performed in the US and Europe with Tony Buck and Kenta Nagai soon becoming irreplaceable portions of a three headed creature that is also Bosetti's fast growing musical priority.

 

 

Royals

Label : Monotype
Author : Alessandro Bosetti
Title : "Royals"
Format : CD

Release Date October 2010Listen Royals 1Listen Royals 2

"A superbly perplexing release making use of spoken word in a highly eccentric manner" - Ed Pinsnet, The Sound Projector.

Three new compositions from Alessandro Bosetti carrying the mark of his unique style and techniques. Somewhere in between musical compositions, songs, literary essays, poems or unreligious mantras. They lie in between genres without embracing any of them. Closer references as Robert Ashley, Rene Lussier, Peter Ablinger, Ornette Coleman (or even the asymmetrical rhythms of Steve Coleman and Henry Threadgill) are still too far away to become handy in describing this music.
He translates intonations of speech into complex and seemingly orchestral scores where meaning, tone and noise are melted into each other. Several variations of techniques known as shadowing or convolution were used in the making of it. Sometimes digital devices were used, some other times analogue - almost hand made - techniques. Bosetti refers to Arcimboldo's paintings from the XVI century as a inspiration to his craft naming it "examples of hand made convolution and shadowing". He has been pouring words into notes. Notes into noise and then again noise into meaning. He has been repeating, meditating, hallucinating.
In those recordings Bosetti is also heard on several instruments as harpsichord, piano and guitar besides his main one, the soprano saxophone.
The core of "Gloriously Repeating" is a sinuous and recurring text and melody - generated from a short fragment from W.G. Sebald poem "After Nature" - exploring the implications of repeating while making repetition its main ingredient and embedded into an extended text sound form.
"Life Expectations" is constructed around the intricate emotional, rhythmic and melodic counterpoints of a casual conversation. Where the sensitive interaction between voices becomes the matter of this composition.
Third and last piece, Dead Man is a surreal short composition whose text implies a ready made pseudo-zen philosophy of resurrection derived from quotes of Iron Maiden's song lyrics.

 

 

 

ALESSANDRO BOSETTI: Zwolfzungen

sedcd055 | Released in 2010 | Ltd Edition 500 copies | $10 Zwolfzungen

Listen Zwolfzungen 1 Zwolfzungen 2 Zwolfzungen 3 Zwolfzungen 4 Zwolfzungen 5 Zwolfzungen 6 Zwolfzungen 7 Zwolfzungen 8

ALESSANDRO BOSETTI: Zwolfungen (twelve portraits of languages I don't understand) sedcd055, 60-minute compact disc with original artwork by Baltimore artist Erin Womack and handmade letterpress ten-panel cardstock sleeves by Shelter Bookworks

The pressing is limited to 500 copies, however Sedimental has only 250 copies available for wholesale/direct sale to its network. Please act quickly if interested!

Label statement:
Alessandro Bosetti is a longtime friend and a musical colleague of many of our friends as well. We have followed Bosetti's creative development over the years and admire his challenging and often discomfort inducing works and live performances. Though we assumed that his sharing the recording of Zwolfzungen with us a few years back was just to keep us abreast of another of his unique projects( this one originally as a piece for German radio), it's power and musicality struck us as being his most realized work up to that point and it was clear and without hesitation that we should make it tangible via the label. We feel it is a perfect synergy of Bosetti's deep interest in text based works combined with all of his broad and dexterous musical abilities. A subtle and understated masterpiece. We are also proud to once again be working with Shelter Bookworks(re: Area C) on the creation and design of the handmade card stock sleeve. Their attention to the detail of materials and execution is unmatched. The inclusion and choice of the eerie and charming drawings of Erin Womack as the artwork for the panels help make this document more than the sum of its parts and something to behold.

Artist statement:
I like to listen to languages I don't understand. I like the moment when the understanding of words stops and every language starts to "make noise". All languages have a special sound, some more than others have particular acoustic characteristics that delight this musician's ears.

 

Label : Errantbodies / Ground Fault
Author : Alessandro Bosetti
Title : "African Feedback"
Format : 64 pages book with Compact Disc
ISBN: 978-0-9772594-5-8
Release date : November 2007
Through a process of listening and speaking, African Feedback documents an exchange between artist Alessandro Bosetti and residents of villages throughout West Africa. Playing music by various experimental and avant-garde composers to people met in villages, Bosetti records their responses, asking them what they are hearing, and how they relate to the music and sounds. Composing their responses, with field recordings made throughout his travels, African Feedback is a musical portrait of cultural translations, misunderstandings, different voices and languages. Including an audio CD and the transcriptions of the listening sessions, along with an introduction by the artist, African Feedback is a beautiful and beguiling work cutting across the ongoing questions of cultural difference. Listen Excerpt #1 Listen Excerpt #2

Label : Die Schachtel, ZEIT05
Author : Alessandro Bosetti
Title : "Exposé"
Format : CD
Release date : April 2007Based on a series of 33 musical ideas written, printed, framed and "exposed" in a recent installation in Milan, Exposè is the first of a new cycle of opus as well as the result of Alessandro Bosetti‚s fascination with speech loops. The mesmerizing voice of Audrey Chen, endlessy repeating the same sentence over the entire duration of each piece, is full of musical nuances, and it invites to and rewards close listening. The result is a moving and totally enchanting listening experience, that takes the listener in an ecstatic and surreal sonic space. "Exposé" brilliantly sustains an air of uneasy calm: misty, microtonal electronics, instrumental layers arranged and recorded in extremely precise fashion, slightly shifting speech-derived rhythmical patterns, provide a subtle, low-key backdrop to the vocal parts, perhaps suggesting the option of adopting an ambient-like hearing strategy: listening closely on headphones heightens the work's strangely compelling blend of the surreal and hypnotic. Listen : Exposé #11 (Excerpt), Exposé #10 (Excerpt), Exposé #16 (Excerpt)

Label : CROUTON NO.34
Author : Alessandro Bosetti
Title : "Her Name"
Format : CD
Release date : March 2007

"Once in a while, after listening to a new cd, I find myself exclaiming: 'this one is really absolutely fantastic! Everything is on its place here!' This happened to me while listening to Bosetti's new cd."
- Vital Weekly

"The seven works on "Her Name" are some of the most accessible sound art pieces around. The music is evocative, wide-ranging and open-minded."
- Bobby Tanzilo, On Milwaukee.

"Listening to this album can be compared to two scenarios being inside of a mental asylum, full of unidentified people with strange stories to tell or watching a documentary about nomads. Either way, you're stuck motionless, waiting with baited breath for the next event to occur, until the story finally unravels itself ... Love the record to death"
- Tom Sekowski GAZ-ETA

"The final word “I" clearly summing up the intricacies and complexities of this unusual, ultimately very rewarding recording."
- Brian Olewnick Bagatellen

Listen : Her Name, Mask (Excerpt), Ivory Coast (Excerpt)

"Her Name" is a record founded on meetings and voices. Having toured extensively throughout Europe, China, Japan, and the U.S., Bosetti's performances consisted of some of the music you'll hear within. During the performances he sat, with a computer sitting on a table next to him, his voice at the aural focus, coming from his mouth in the middle of his face, he translated the recorded voices of the people he's met along the way. Those voices appear in this recording. However, many more things also appear: guitar, piano, harmonium, double bass, trumpet, electronics, cello and field recordings combine in small ensembles and reconstructed jazz groups to create songs (yes, really!) that take the listener on an amazing trip around this world and others. Recorded in Amsterdam, Sangha, Berlin, Milano, and Baltimore and featuring a full cast of guest musicians and vocalists such as Ernst Karel, Koen Nutters, Morten J. Olsen, Ana Djangouno Dolo, Ibe, Adachi Tomomi, Mariangela Tinelli, Paul Glazer, Ayako Fukunaga, Chico Mello, Fernanda Farah and Die Maulwerker, "Her Name" is a powerful record about the collective voice, cohesively honed into an amazing listening experience that speaks to everyone. Beautiful recordings craftfully mixed by Alessandro Bosetti and Giuseppe Ielasi and mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.
"Her Name" is released in an edition of 500, packaged in an oversized die cut wallet and designed by Jim Schoenecker.

 

Label :Rossbin, RS025
Author : Alessandro Bosetti
Title : "Il Fiore della Bocca"
Format : CD
Release date : January 2007.

"Bosetti's work has undjudgemental embrace, complex transvaluations and challenges our liberalism."
-The Wire

"I do admire Bosetti for putting these questions out there, and for causing this listener to engage in a good deal of reflection."
- Brian Olewnick, Bagatellen

"In a society obsessed with healt and fearing to face suffering, Il fiore della Bocca sticks out for it's grace. "
-Dionisio Capuano - Blow Up

"First I was a bit shocked. Is this pleasure at the expense of others? Another form of shock music? But the more I heard it, and the more I know about it, the more fascinating it gets. It turns out to be a truly fascinating release."
-Frans De Waard, Vital Weekly

"Extremely beautiful."
-SandsZine.

Listen : Komiker, Buchstaben

Produced in 2003 for the sound art department of a german radio station, "Il Fiore della Bocca" is one of the most controversial text sound compositions by Alessandro Bosetti. Composed exclusively with the voices of physically and mentally handicapped people, the piece displays an impressive richness, depth and variety of sound, covering the full range of musical possibilities of the spoken voice; from heavily processed to completely unprocessed, naked and direct. The piece has an ambiguous nature that lies somewhere between an experimental radio play and an extended, powerfully voice driven, noise composition. Bosetti has taken an impressive journey into what is commonly perceived as "disturbing". He has thus engaged in a process of transformation and metamorphosis with both the sound materials and their perceptions in order to develop musical beauty out of these "abnormal" voices.
A long series of conversations, where spastic, aphasic and larynx-less persons are confronted with examples of "deconstructed voice" (in the tradition of experimental music and sound poetry), has been the core of a two year long intimate relationship with those speakers and the starting point of the compositional process. All commentaries, reflections and reactions had been recorded in order to create a new composition with those collected materials. Similar to his other text sound pieces like "African Feedback", "Everyday Objects", "The Listeners", "The Mouth" or "Zwölfzungen", conversations, human interaction, comprehension and misunderstanding are essential to this piece. Since it's premiere on Deutschland Radio Kultur in 2004, it has been performed many times; in presence of the original speakers and in several live multichannel performances which provocated a wide and passionate range of reactions and discussions. "Il Fiore della Bocca", is intended as a piece in the form of a flower, either one of the red roses Claudia is singing about in the middle section of the composition, or a mouth-flower, as the title suggests. Also, a flower close in inspiration to the weathered, ephemeral and dying flowers that Zeami used to describe the quality of Nô theater actors. It's a piece based on love, human interaction and the contemplation of differences which reaches the point where the extremely different becomes the same.
Recorded and composed between September 2002 and August 2003 in Milan and Berlin.
First broadcasted by Deutschland radio Kultur, October 24th, 2003.

Label : Nat Nat 04
Author : Alessandro Bosetti
Title : "Pinocchio"
Format : CD
Release date : 2002

This cd remixes and re-composes materials otherwise performed live as a quadriphonic piece of 'listening theatre' to be held in a dark space. It is a sound-text composition using as root materials, spoken word fragments, saxophones sounds, and noises from Alessandro Bosetti's instrumental vocabulary.
Part of the process in constructing the piece, as well as producing sounds and composing them, was to interview chosen people on the topic pinocchio. Without preparation, just trusting on memory and invention the fragments were chosen for their musical qualities as well as for their meaning. some fragments are still recognizable, leading to a sort of very quick hoerspiel-like montage. Howver, most of them are recomposed in more abstract and spatialised musical structures. Even though it is in Italian it doesnÕt necessarily requires a proper comprehension of the language.
This work follows, on one side, the previous steps of Alessandro Bosetti's spoken word project melgùn, focusing on musical aspects of language (melgùn, la macchina che moltiplica a per tre). On the other side, it goes beyond the childish, fairytale like aspects of the story of that ambiguous animated piece of wood, a mysterious character, somewhere between a metamorphic object and an 'ante litteram' anarchist, once referred to by Italian writer Giorgio Manganelli as being 'always anthropomorphic, never human'.
Front cover artwork (reproduced above) by Sven-Åke Johansson.

Label : Grob 652
Author : Alessandro Bosetti
Title : "Zona"
Format : CD
Release date : 2004

"Probably the most striking saxophone recording in the last five years is Italian Alessandro Bosetti’s ZONA — a mind-blowing exploration of white noise and soprano saxophone acoustics that sounds like doors slamming in the mind .. Baltimore OutLoud.

Since the work of Anthony Braxton, Sonny Rollins, Steve Lacy or Evan Parker, solo saxophone recordings are no longer a ”problem.” And especially recordings of solo soprano saxophone – Parker and Lacy (and Lol Coxhill) have more than just rehabilitated this instrument, long neglected by jazz and improvised music. Solo recording has become so canonized that an improvising saxophone player is expected, at some time, to make a solo album.
Alessandro Bosetti, from Milan, Italy, but who has been living in Berlin since 2000, is a composer of electro-acoustic music, an author of experimental radio plays, one of the central figures of the Berlin improv scene, label boss and soprano saxophone player. Zona presents HIS solo saxophone album. The music was recorded in an East-Berlin radio station at the beginning of 2003, and Bosetti knew well how to use the old but well preserved possibilities of the studio. The pieces were recorded with a total of six microphones, each of which took a different position in the room: one far away, taking in the sound, one very close, catching only the austere sound of the saxophone.
Bosetti left the improvisations themselves untouched during the post production. What we hear are pieces in real time. What he processed are the individual recording tracks, the individual microphone positions. He cut them up – not with a pair of scissors, but virtually in a digital studio – and put them back together anew, making one track out of six. A small but highly thought-out operation which transforms these improvisations into electro-acoustic compositions. What this means concretely is that we hear a few seconds of improvisation from the perspective of microphone 1, then a longer sequence from the perspective of microphone 3, then a bit from microphone 6, then .... Although we hear only one improvisation in each case, there is nonetheless the impression of a sometimes hectic, sometimes hard and always radical cut-up collage. It is, however, ”only” the quickly changing perspectives that create this kaleidoscopic impression.
The entire post production of Bosetti would be, however, in vain and pretentious, if there were no musically substantial result after the improvising. But Bosetti’s virtuous playing vouches for this. He doesn’t let himself get intimidated by the greats Braxton, Lacy or Evan Parker (musicians who are his role models), but rather he controls the entire sound register of his instrument with ease and originality. He plays the energy – without falling into Free Jazz clichés; he masters silence – without becoming a toady to New Music. No matter how pronounced the constructive will is, behind this music is a great improvising imagination.

Label : Fringes 05
Author : Alessandro Bosetti
Title : "La Macchina che moltiplica A per 3"
Format : CD
Release date : 2000

Based on texts of the italian poet Corrado Costa.
With : Alessandro Bosetti, soprano saxophone, sampling, re-composing; Antonello Cassinotti, voice, acting; Renato Rinaldi, amplified objects, strings, devices, sampling; Filippo Monico, drums, objects.