Trophies Songbook

Composition

2009 - 2017

Catalogue number : 24

Ruota di maggio, as transcribed by Kenta Nagai.

Between 2009 and 2017 Alessandro Bosetti led the trio Trophies with australian/berlin based drummer Tony Buck and the japanese/ny based guitarist Kenta Nagai.
The trio is based on a simple principle: each piece is a loop or cycle obtained by transcribing the prosody and intonation of a voice that speaks from a text by Bosetti. Loops are repeated stubbornly identical to themselves for the duration of each piece. The transcription is faithfully traced by Bosetti’s voice and Kenta Nagai’s microtonal guitar working on an unison at once extremely tight and full of detail and friction while Tony Buck’s drumming moves on a parallel and independent track building unstructured grooves and bringing out the irregular rhythmic framework of each loop. Trophies has toured extensively in Europe and the United States and released four albums (in addition to two unreleased albums with alternative versions of the band: a quintet with three voices with Bosetti, Nagai, Christian Kesten, Audrey Chen and Morten J. Olsen and an acoustic quintet with Bosetti on soprano sax, Chris Heenan, Derek Shirley on double bass, Steve Heater on drums and Johnny Chang on violin).
The songbook of Trophies amounts to ca. fifty title, of which circa half have been recorded. Most of them have been manually re-transcribed by Kenta Nagai and adapted to his personal guitar language. Since 2017 Bosetti pursued the prosodic/speech music work with Kenta Nagai in the large scale project Journal de Bord and the band was put on hold temporarily although it never disbanded.

© Alessandro Bosetti / 2025