Trophies is :
Alessandro Bosetti
- voice, electronics, text-sound composition
Audrey Chen - voice, cello
Christian Kesten - voice
Kenta Nagai - fretless guitar, shamisen
Morten J. Olsen - drums
>>>>> Central to the music of trophies is the voice or a multitude of voices. A type of voices bordering song and speech but not embracing either one of those practices completely. Spoken/sung phrases are repeated over and over by three vocalists and embedded in a musical texture created by drums, fretless guitar and electronics. Looped phrases in Trophies disappear from the listener's perception after a while. They become hidden in plain sight and vanish altogether after repeated listening. <<<<
In a passage of his piano composition
Humoreske Op. 20 Robert Schumann added an "innere
stimme" , a third melodic line between the right and the left
hand ones that is not to be played.
The interpreter is supposed to simply sing this melody in his mind while
his hands are playing the other two lines. This introduces the haunting
presence of a missing object inside the musical discourse.
Trophies music reverses this process by making looped vocal lines
- at first so unavoidably evident - virtually unnoticeable after prolonged
listening. Spoken/sung phrases are repeated over and over by three
vocalists and embedded in a musical texture created by drums, fretless
guitar and electronics. While the hidden melody of Schumann piece
start appearing as a ghost - or at least as a negative, absent, presence
- the looped phrases in Trophies disappear from the listener's
perception after a while. They become hidden in plain sight and vanish
altogether after repeated listening.
On one side Shumann's inner melody is present only in absence,
and as an absent object it cannot be perceived. The composer plays
further with this paradox by not adding the inner melody in a second
repetition of the same passage suggesting a double negation, the absence
of the absent object. On the other side the spoken and repeated melodies
of Trophies do not disappear in order to make room for the background
to emerge. They rather keep existing as devoid, negative musical objects.
They exist as mist, or clouds of vacuum.
Central to the music of trophies is the voice or a multitude of voices. A
type of voices bordering song and speech but not embracing either
one of those practices completely.
A voice could be defined as a sticking out, ever-sharp, contrasted,
willful and somehow agitated object appearing in our field of perception.
Far from being just "what comes
out from the mouth" or the matter of speech and singing, the
notion of voice has a much broader nature. We often refer to voices
of nature, voices of the dead, even voices of objects. As
something that sticks out I imagine the voice as the only
sharp figure in a blurred, out of focus photography.
The voices of Trophies, due to their excessive attributes, their redundancy
generated by repetition, stop sticking out and start "sticking
in". They disappear, sink and implode into being blurry
and absent objects. Invisible although placed right in front of the
listeners face thus becoming anti-voices, strings of sound and meaning
weaved into each other until they melt and disappear.
Text materials used in this band are my song. They had been written
by me in order to tell a story. It's a story of life and death. Not
life OR death but life 'AND death since both are present at the same
time. Life and death are what dubbing is all about. The voice and
its double, the living and its zombi replicant walking side by side,
performing the same gesture in astonishing precision. Those
texts sound like collages but they are not. They sound
like unimportant matter and in-fact they are unimportant unless you
know the context. They are coming from my innere stimme, the
hidden self willing to sing that has been so mortified so often in
years of strategies of mediation and translation in sound art. Thinking
of projects like Arcoparlante and African Feedback and The Listeners
among many other. To just say that in the cheesiest way Trophies texts
come from my heart and just evaporate in front of your face as a listener
and our faces as performers.
The band first assembled this repertoire in march 2009 in
Venice. We had several days of many hours long rehearsals and memorization.
In this occasion I remember experiencing the movement of my mouth
and lips and throath as seen from outside my body. I would leave the
body and wonder around the stage and then turn back to see my mouth
go on automatically. It would articulate those phrases and melodies
over and over by itself. In that moment my perception of music was
focused on something between my mouths and my voice.
The speech melody of those recordings had been carefully transcribed
from casual recordings, mostly made on skype or during phone conversation
where Audrey Chen or Christian Kesten would read the texts i wrote. Those
phrases became like little fragments of attitude as seen though a
magnifying glass, a crystallization of pitch by mean of repetition.
The rhythmical structure is generated by the same strings of casual
speech. There is no pulse, no "one" beat, no metric. Nevertheless
rhythmic determination is all pervading.
Ever present element in Trophies music is the dubbing of the speech
melody by a pre recorded electric piano line. This acts as a raga
machine, often used by indian classical music players. Around this
frame all the music is played live in a ecstatic exercise
of unison, one of the great secret weapons and paradoxes - perfect
unison is virtually unachievable by human players - of music.
A fragment of text reads : exclusive
pleasure. related to jam, stamps and cherries. just words,
over and over. It could be paraphrased as exclusive
torment, related to something we forgot (or simply disappeared),no
need to add anything.
Texts and ideas proliferate and sprawl through transformation, translation,
distortion, copulation, reverberation and reflexion. In Trophies music
everything just stays the same and by mean of staying the same it
just disappears.
