FasFari
Label : Xing. Xong collection - artist records.
Title : FasFari
Format : LP and collector edition
Release date : February 21st, 2024
Total time : 38'37"
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.
FasFari by Alessandro Bosetti, thirteenth release of the XONG collection – artist records, is on white vinyl, in a limited and numbered edition of 150 copies, together with a print run of 20 collector’s editions. Each of these are accompanied with a graphic and text table, designed and hand drawn by the artist with phonetic alphabet, that transcribe the memories of his encounter with each ‘voice donor’.
Available at
* Soundohm (international mailorder)
standard edition
collector’s edition
* Flash Art
collector’s edition
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.