About African Feedback: Through a process of listening and speaking, African Feedback documents an exchange between artist Alessandro Bosetti and residents of villages throughout West Africa. Playing music by various experimental and avant-garde composers to people met in villages, Bosetti records their responses, asking them what they are hearing, and how they relate to the music and sounds. Composing their responses, with field recordings made throughout his travels, African Feedback is a musical portrait of cultural translations, misunderstandings, different voices and languages. Including an audio CD and the transcriptions of the listening sessions, along with an introduction by the artist, African Feedback is a beautiful and beguiling work cutting across the ongoing questions of cultural difference.
Alessandro Bosetti was born in Milan, Italy in 1973. He is a composer and sound artist working on the musicality of spoken words and unusual aspects of spoken communication, producing text-sound compositions featured in live performances, radio broadcastings and published recordings. Field research and interviews build the basis for abstract compositions, along with electro-acoustic and acoustic collages, relational strategies, trained and untrained instrumental practices, vocal explorations and digital manipulations.
Brandon LaBelle is an artist and writer working with sound and the specifics of location. Through his work with Errant Bodies Press he has co-edited the anthologies 3Site of Sound: Of Architecture and the Ear2, 3Writing Aloud: The Sonics of Language2, 3Surface Tension: Problematics of Site2 and “Radio Territories”. He initiated and curated the Beyond Music series and festivals from 1997 - 2002 at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center in Los Angeles, and in 2001 he organized 3Social Music2, a radio series for Kunstradio ORF, Vienna. His installation work has been featured in exhibitions and festivals internationally, including “Sampling Rage”(1999) Podewil Berlin, 3Sound as Media2(2000) ICC Tokyo, “Bitstreams”(2001) Whitney Museum New York, 3Pleasure of Language2(2002) and his writings have been included in various books and journals, including 3Experimental Sound and Radio2 (MIT) and 3Soundspace: Architecture for Sound and Vision2 (Birkhäuser). He presented a solo exhibition at Singuhr galerie in Berlin (2004), and an experimental composition for pirate drummers as part of Virtual Territories, Nantes (2005). His ongoing project to build a library of radio memories, 3Phantom Radio2, was presented fall 2006 as part of Radio Revolten, Halle Germany. He is the author of 3Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art2 (Continuum 2006).
The work of Jarrod Fowler is a series of analytical investigations into the nature of musical thought and practice. These investigations-as-music question both assumptions and instabilities present in music. They also explore the role of ethnological, institutional, psychological and social contexts. Through variable methods of construction, Fowler studies rhythm, representation, perception and meaning. Fowler currently resides and teaches percussion and rhythm in Massachusetts, USA.
This evening's program:
Alessandro Bosetti - video and sound performance
Brandon Labelle - video and sound performance
Jarrod Fowler - live set