Alessandro Bosetti – Didone

LP on Kohlhaas Records [KHS 018] out April 2021, preorder at http://www.kohlhaas.it/project/alessandro-bosetti-didone/

Giulia Zaniboni, voice
Dan Kinzelman, tenor saxophone, flute
Luca Perciballi, electric and acoustic guitar
Glauco Salvo, electric guitar, banjo
Simone Sferruzza, drums
Andrea Grillini, drums

Music and concept by Alessandro Bosetti.

In September 2019 Alessandro Bosetti was invited by fellow composer and curator Riccardo La Foresta to create a new work for a newly created ensemble as part of a residency program hosted by Centro Musica in Modena, Italy.
The very first encounter took place on Skype – kind of a prediction of the forthcoming physically distanced pandemic times. The first, straight-to-the-point question Bosetti posed to each musician was to tell him the history of their life.
The materials collected in the interviews subsequently underwent a process of anonymization, selection and cut-up in order to create the imaginary autobiography of Didone, a genderless character on whom Bosetti composed a combinatory poem in 84 aphorisms, six of which have been translated into music.
The ensemble consists of extremely different musical profiles: the contemporary soprano Giulia Zaniboni, minimalist banjo and acoustic guitar player Glauco Salvo, and four musicians with a jazz background such as guitarist Luca Perciballi, drummers Andrea Grillini and Simone Sferruzza, and saxophonist Dan Kinzelman (also part of Hobby Horse trio and long-time collaborator of Enrico Rava). Some of the stylistic features of Bosetti’s project Trophies (along with Kenta Nagai and Tony Buck) can be detected here and there. Persistent repetitions, mesmerizing sonic masses and extended, oblique melodic lines are here led by the clear and precise voice of soprano Giulia Zaniboni.
The voice is at the heart of this work: the textual fragments of the autobiographies are filtered through Zaniboni’s contemporary vocality, while informing the instrumental writing as well. Themes and textures unveil traces of words or sentences; fragments of biographies are embedded in the intricate instrumental dialogue between the two drummers.
A final layer was added by Ettore Tripodi, a unique and out-of-time visual artist who imagined Didone in a series of illustrations accompanying the poem.
Didone is a work about the reconfiguration and recombination of identities, where every specific sense of belonging melts into an indistinct swarming of possibilities.

Didone is released by Kohlhaas as a black vinyl 12” LP edition of 300 copies with cover artwork and booklet featuring illustrations by Ettore Tripodi.

Recorded at Centro Musica, Modena between 18th and 22nd September 2019, under the residency program Autobiografie strumentali hosted by Centro Musica – Comune di Modena and funded by Legge 2/18 Regione Emilia-Romagna – Progetto Sonda.

Mixed by Alessandro Bosetti.
Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.
Cover and illustrations by Ettore Tripodi.
Layout by Campomarzio.

Thanks to Riccardo La Foresta.

Didone

Didone A13 (Cos'è un suono bello)

The Lovesong of the Mountain Troll 120-220 Bpm

Robe rehearsal 181017

Vormaks II

MJ13

From LAL-102 - Red Brut - Cloaked Travels LP.

Following her debut LP (KRAAK, 2018) and a string of tapes and 7-inches, Red Brut drops her second album, Cloaked Travels. It is a joined release by the Finnish labels Ikuisuus and Lal Lal Lal.  

In many aspects, Cloaked Travels is an amazing realisation of what Red Brut does best: molding the absurd, the amateurish, and the crude into beautiful and elegant sound pieces. These eight “songs”, organised in two suites, dwell between abstract avant-garde and pop sensibility. Working with cassette tapes, Red Brut enhances the ambiguous qualities of her sounds with the warm distortion and background hiss typical of the medium. The music leaves the listener to him- or herself, happily lost in small universes that contain many layers of beauty, discomfort, and intimacy.  

Susan Sontag once claimed that diaries, despite secretly kept by the author, are meant to be read by others. Red Brut’s intimate and highly personal take on musique concrète is characterised by a homely feeling: sounds of doors, kids outside her house, a synth that sounds like a house pet, muffled whispers of her voice. Her compositions sound like you are secretly reading her diary. You are in the uncomfortable position of watching someone chasing her own tail, unaware of the fact that she is being the object of our gaze.  

Unaware? Cloaked Travels displays on a certain point the sound of a squeaking door. Over and over until it starts sounding like a wild free jazz solo. Is Verbiesen playing tricks on our minds? Is she actually the Unconsciously Watched? Or is she cloaked as that character, and in fact very well aware that we are peeping into her inner emotional universe; maybe she is even projecting a fake version of what sounds like here day-to-day, intimate environment — making us conscious of our own gaze? Again Sontag comes to mind: she deliberately projected a well-constructed character in both her diaries as in public life.  

Cloaked Travels contains distinct and carefully composed pieces that play upon the tension between the concrete and the abstract. Every song acts like a Cave of Plato: we are unable to see what is actually happening, we only see the shadows of a door moving or the sounds of someone gurgling. The album suggests some fundamental questions: is what we conceive as reality nothing but a derivative of the Ideal? Is there really something behind the shadow, or is the shadow the actual reality?  

- text by Niels Latomme  credits released July 3, 2020

Music & artwork by Marijn Verbiesen. 
Final montage by Michiel Klein. 
Mastered by Samuli Tanner.

Red Brut - Songs for Another World I

Excerpt from the B-side of the 'Albatross' cassette, to be released in September.

Albatross

Grant Evans - India Ink Mirror (excerpt)

L a m a t r o i s - The Birth Of A New Civilization

studio edit-
live performance: XTRO, 30.10.20 KUUB, Utrecht. (pres. Gaudeamus)
https://gaudeamus.nl/en/events/kuub-concert-xtro/

marmalade sky (studio edit)

Commissioned and performed by the ensemble Metamorphosis

Plucked. for harpsichord and strings(2019)

Disquiet Junto Project 0469: [Missing in Caption]. The Assignment: Make music that pushes the constraints of descriptive television captions.

In one scene of this old war movie, the man is saying goodbye to go to another well-founded, short and successful war, and his wife is deeply worried.

The bells call to battle, the wife struggles to find parting words, and even the worn-out VHS tape is deeply moved.

Whispering provided by these two CC0 samples:
https://freesound.org/people/geoneo0/sounds/193818/
https://freesound.org/people/LadyImperatrix/sounds/503270/ <- the heartbreaking words!

Image based on David Monies: The Farewell
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Monies-Farewell.jpg

More on this 469th weekly Disquiet Junto project:
https://disquiet.com/0469/
Project discussion:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0469-missing-in-caption/

CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

Didone A13 (Cos'è un suono bello)

Alessandro Bosetti

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