Alessandro BOSETTI
“Plane/Talea 31-34”

Since a few years Alessandro Bosetti has been collecting voices that become part of the Plane/Talea archive. The creation of the archive stems from dozens of individual meetings and recording sessions, in which each voice is detached from its owner or originator and anonymized. With each new iteration and performance, Bosetti plays the archive as if it were an instrument. He searches for hidden details and correspondences through exploration, immersion and contemplation. Each re-activation of the archive results in a dense and
swarming polyphony made up of thousands of short utterances – shorter than any word bearing a meaning – recombined and interwoven into complex textures. The particularity of the grain of Plane/Talea lies in the autonomous and darting life that each of these fragments lives in a teeming community of voices. Such polyphonies are rich in microtonal detail emerging from the incessant juxtaposition of vocal objets trouvés. Harmonic relationships are sometimes rough and chaotic, other times surprisingly just. The voices are never treated electronically but only recombined and musical tension is provided by the particular grain, inflection, energy of each one of them in counterpoint to the others and to a frugally used instrumentarium (Harpsichord, Ondes Martenot, Cristal Baschet, grand piano, analog synth, Hammond organ). Implicit reference goes to ancient, modern and postmodern forms of vocal polyphony. “Plane/Talea 31-34” – the continuation of the homonymous 2016 LP – is a work of sampling that projects an imaginary community and a disembodied choir. The four arching and extensive tracks were created between 2017 and 2018 and bear the trace of two specific moments: August nights in a country house in Vicobarone, in the hills of Piacenza (31-32) and a week-long residency at the “Studio Venezia”, an environment created by French artist Xavier Veilhan in the French pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale (33-34).

« Encounters of this sort did happen, with the voice still clinging onto its own origin, and then seen, as it were, coming out of the original mouth and caught saying other things, with a slightly different intonation, a slightly different timbre, maybe due to a little aging, an extra cigarette, a cold. At that point we would come out unsettled, or maybe convinced that it was not the same voice anymore, but another. »