Alessandro Bosetti - Gloriously Repeating
I like to think of this piece as a musical composition, a song, a literary essay, a poem or an unreligious mantra. It lies in between genres without embracing any of them. It came form an urgency to say and sing something that felt quite emotional for me. Since I could neither sing nor say it, it came out as an uncanny mixture of the two.
I based it on a sinuous and recurring text and melody that explores the implications of repeating while making repetition its main ingredient. Repetition is the matter of our lives, of failure and birth, of dreams and pulsation.
I derived all melodies from recording of spoken renditions of my own texts ( plus a hidden quote) by Christopher Williams, Fernanda Farah, Ksenija Stevanovic and myself. I translated the intonations of speech into a seemingly orchestral score where meaning, tone and noise are melted into each other. Several variations of techniques known as shadowing or convolution were used in the making of it. Sometimes digital implementations were used, some other times analogue techniques, almost hand made.
I like to think of Arcimboldo's paintings from the XVI century as a inspiration in my craft. They are examples of hand made convolution and shadowing, if this can explain the process a little more. I have been pouring words into notes. Notes into noises and then again noises into meaning.
I have been repeating, meditating, hallucinating.
I used no stringent concept, no abstraction and a musical structure heavily infused with discourse. Again, this piece is meandering. It is conceived to have you loose the sense of time and structure. It features the continuum of radio, where listeners tune in and out in casual moments. I wish it could have been hours long. Weeks, months, years. It would have fulfilled the peculiarity of radio broadcast that is itself a snake with no head and no tail. Failing, trying again, failing better. Again and again.