FasFari is composed of short vocal emissions that deal with a form of speech before the act of saying, sound particles that invoke meaning without ever fully unfolding it, and barely suggest a body and a biographical identity. FasFari is the 36th incarnation of Plane Talea, an archive/instrument that Alessandro Bosetti has been building since 2016, made up of anonymous voices—to date more than 80—sorted into thousands of utterances.
Each Plane Talea performance is preceded by individual recording encounters in which volunteers donate their voice and accept that it can live autonomously, becoming a living, fictitious and real object. The collected utterances are ordered in an idiosyncratic taxonomy that arranges them in organum and constitute an instrument, then played to create a purely utopian vocal music, a polyphony that builds teeming textures starting from the multiplication of the details and imperfections of which the voices are carriers.
In recent years Alessandro Bosetti has mainly created vocal music: abstract and a cappella polyphonies written for the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart (Portraits de voix) or for large amateur choirs (Concerto per fatiche, in collaboration with the Musicatreize ensemble in Marseille). His solitary and ventriloquistic logorrhea in MaskMirror has been expanded in conversation pieces such as Sistema or Acqua Sfocata, Utilità del Fuoco ed Altre Risposte Concentriche. The grammatical and geometric modulations used in his Coniugazioni series, or the meticulous vocal calligraphy used in reproducing the mother's voice in Diario di bordo are all examples of this vocation. A vocality which, while absorbing influences such as ancient polyphony and Renaissance madrigalism, welcomes every genre and vocal posture, and is based on an undisciplined idea of phonation, that thinks of the voice as an inexhaustibly different and multiple being, of which the imperfections and singularities, and above all the minimal inflections, are a source of continuous renewal and evolution. FasFari, the latest version of Plane Talea, is also the first of the series that relies exclusively on the voice whereas in previous iterations other sound sources were added: in his first LP (Planea/Talea, Holidays Records, 2016) these were environmental recordings, while in his second double LP (Plane/Talea 31-34, 2022) instrumental and synthetic sounds integrated the voices from the archive. In FasFari the device becomes a closed but vast universe, purely vocal, a cappella. Vocal sounds are never electronically transformed but only recomposed, recombined, juxtaposed or superimposed (no sound processing, cloning or selection through AI); all sentences begin and end naturally.
Alessandro Bosetti plays the archive like Eglisak, the funny organist of one of Jules Verne's stories, but, unlike Eglisak, he is a puppeteer subject to his creatures and follows their direction in a music that is already written in the imperfections and in the uniqueness of the voices. Even if here and there just-intoned chords and pulsating rhythms emerge, the majority of the material suggests an interrogative music, made of microtonal layerings and unlikely mechanisms that only ask to be unfolded in their complexity.
Limited edition of 150 copies.
Alessandro Bosetti (born 1973 in Milan, lives and works in Marseille) is a composer and sound artist who focuses is in the fringe area between spoken language and music, working on the musicality of spoken words and unusual aspects of spoken communication, producing text-sound compositions featured in live performances, radio broadcastings and published recordings. In his work he moves across the line between sound anthropology and composition, often including translation and misunderstanding in the creative process. Field research and interviews build the basis for abstract compositions, along with electro-acoustic and acoustic collages, relational strategies, trained and untrained instrumental practices, vocal explorations and digital manipulations.
Bosetti created a series of highly compelling sound works where
relational aesthetics meets innovative composition and published more than a dozen of cd's of his own music along with countless other collaborations. Since 2000 he has been a key Ars Acustica figure, and created a vast body of electro acoustic and text sound works for institutions as WDR Studio Akustische Kunst, DeutschlandRadio and GRM among many other . Pieces like
Il Fiore della Bocca (Rossbin/DLR 2005)—a work on the vocality of the mentally and physically impaired— and
African Feedback—a collaborative scrutiny on experimental music in West Africa—(
Errant Bodies Press, 2004) have received wide recognition and are considered classic contributions to the genre. Alessandro Bosetti is an emotional performer that has consistently toured in Europe, Asia and the United States as a soloist, leading his speech ensemble Trophies with
Tony Buck and Kenta Nagai and in collaborations with fellow vocal performers as Jennifer Walshe and Tomomi Adachi and with pianist
Chris Abrahams.
