Alessandro Bosetti/Antje Vowinckel - Charlemagne...

Bosetti, Alessandro/Vowinckel, Antje
Charlemagne, la vue attachee sur son lac de
Constance, amoureux de l’abime cache
Bowindo
03

Some of our French readers may offer a better translation of the title. The best I can manage is, “Charlemagne, his eyes fixed on Lake Constance, in love with the ruined mask”. Not that it matters. The disc in question is oddly structured, featuring two lengthy pieces by Bosetti and a shorter one by Vowinckel. Both of Bosetti’s are entirely electronic in nature having little to do with his perhaps better known quiet work on the soprano saxophone, both solo and in groups like Phosphor. The first, “Sardinia and Japan are Islands”, strings together in seemingly random fashion a large range of unrelated sounds including taped voices, processed field recordings and digitally generated tones. It’s something of a mishmash, a stream of consciousness kind of journey where, if the listener isn’t entirely in sync with the music’s creator (and I fear I’m not in this case), a sense of arbitrariness creeps in and one is left with the disquieting notion that episodes have been stitched together without any compelling reason. There’s a shallowness of field that fails to convince one of a viable alternate reality. This is decidedly not the case in the subsequent track, “Kitchen Piece” which works altogether more successfully. The original sound source is an improvisation performed by Oreledigneur (the duo of Giuseppe Ielasi and Renato Rinaldi) in “Rita’s Kitchen”, presumably then processed extensively by Bosetti. One of the basic aspects of the work is that, happily, it does indeed largely sound as though one is in a kitchen! The noises are kept abstract and sections are sliced and diced with abandon, but there’s a “kitchenness” to the proceedings that’s quite appealing. It’s also far less claustrophobic than the preceding number, expansive in breadth and taking special delight in inserting palpable space between sounds, opening everything up. One can almost visualize the little side trip up a faucet, over a dish rack, a peek out the window, kicking crumbs out of the toaster, etc. It’s a very nice work.

Antje Vowinckel, a new name to me, is apparently better known for her radio plays, but she plunges into the musique concrete field with abandon in her piece, “NIPPS”. It’s an interesting contrast to the first Bosetti piece since, in some ways, there’s a similarity of approach, a kind of free-for-all attack where each subsequent element may bear little obvious relationship to what came before or follows after. Which is to say that perhaps the reason I find Vowinckel’s work fairly convincing may simply be that I feel an affinity for the way she arranges sound, that the series of events reads as somehow logical to me, even if it’s impossible to explain why. In any event, she uses many “big” sounds: explosive vocalizations, sci-fi ray gun blasts, large blobs of tone, all of which cushion and envelop the mid-range clatter and upper level sizzles and whistles. When, late in the composition, a collage of Japanese voices bursts in, it’s somehow right, a door opening into an adjacent video parlor. “NIPPS” is vibrant, even a tad gaudy, but it brims with life and that's all one can ask.

~ Brian Olewnick