U35 | Vanessa Rossetto | The way you make me feel
1. I cut my own_excerpt
3. The way you make me feel_excerpt
format : CD ltd to 200 hand numbered copies
all copies come with an additional art card on 300gr satin paper
release year : 2016
length : 46’43
tracks :
1. I cut my own
2. Sleep edit
3. The way you make me feel
4. When I get home
status : still available
>>> order via Paypal : chalkdc@unfathomless.net
(Belgium) : 14 € (inc.postage)
(Europe) : 15 € (inc.postage)
(World) : 16 € (inc.postage)
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: info :
In fall 2014, I spent some time in New York City in preparation for a performance. During this time, I recorded as close to continually as I could given normal human and mechanical shortcomings – an SD card runs out of room, a battery dies, a person wakes too groggy to check the recorder or, in a flurry of activity, leaves it dormant. After a time, you start to forget the device is even there which is of course the purpose but also interacts in its own way with the frailties of human memory – if you forget it’s there you forget to check to make sure it’s functioning properly. Despite all that, at the end of the allotted time I was left with a large volume of recorded material that took me longer than I’d have liked to comb through, sort, assess and determine a structural framework around which I could wind bits of this straw into something resembling a form. In all this record of whirlwind events, I found myself most drawn to the moments at rest, in between overt actions and dialogue, and it was out of these that I constructed the majority of these pieces. It so happened that during the time of recording I was already collapsing into an unprecedentedly long, deep and unbroken depressive state. As so often can happen, the document I had planned to make and set out to make is not the one I ended up making. It couldn’t be. I believe that is reflected in the decision to form these pieces out of the absences and interstices – the pauses, misfirings, missing pieces, long sleeps and synaptic gaps and, of course, the way they make me feel.
(Vanessa Rossetto, April 2016)
: reviews :
The way you make me feel est le résultat de quelques semaines d’enregistrements intenses à New-York. Durant une résidence dans cette métropole, Vanessa Rossetto a passé tout son “temps libre” à capturer tous les sons possibles, présents à NY : sons électriques, électroniques, urbains, industriels, mécaniques, etc. Il s’agit pour la plupart de sons anecdotiques, des phénomènes sonores qu’on n’entend plus et des parasites imper-ceptibles. Vanessa Rossetto a ainsi capturé sur le vif toute une masse de ces débris so-nores, de ces parasites acoustiques, et de ces déchets environnementaux pour composer une suite de quatre pièces chez elle.
Tous ces détails quotidiens, ces sons environnants, proches du chaos et sources d’angoisse quand on s’y attarde, tout ce matériel qui fait notre environnement sonore est ici décomposé en petites unités, superposées les unes aux autres. Vanessa Rossetto accumule des strates d’enregistrements pour composer quatre longues pièces continues. Cette conti-nuité, c’est le dépassement de l’angoisse et du chaos, la maîtrise d’un environnement qui nous échappe. En décomposant ces sons pour les assembler et les structurer de manière personnelle et intime, avec douceur et noirceur également, Rossetto peut se réapproprier un monde hors de contrôle. Elle se l’approprie par la composition, et nous pouvons nous retrouver dans ce monde grâce à l’écoute de cette appropriation personnelle. Je crois que toute la force de ces quatre compositions réside dans cette réappropriation d’un monde sonore hors de contrôle, dans ce dépassement du chaos et de l’angoisse.
Si, à première vue, ces pièces paraissent sombres, abstraites et continues, une écoute plus attentive révèle de nombreux passages lumineux, de nombreux éclats dans les ruptures, mais aussi une foule de détails et une possibilité de reconnaître de nombreux matériaux qui au début paraissent insaisissables. Vanessa Rossetto a composé ici quatre pièces uti-lisant une large palette de couleurs, des structures claires, qui évoluent et surprennent, des matériaux hors du commun (du commun musical j’entends), quatre pièces uniques et fan-tastiques qui dépassent totalement leurs sources, qui dépassent la quotidienneté, l’urbanité et le parasitisme de ces dernières pour leur conférer un statut d’œuvre d’art.
Julien Héraud
Improv Sphere
Embedded in the phrase “the way you make me feel” is the idea that another party can compel emotional experience. This is a bedrock assumption of popular song, but if you retain the services of a cognitive-behaviorally oriented therapist and share such notions with them they’re likely to try to shake them up and break them apart. They will do so not because it’s an inherently pathological perspective, although there aren’t many places where you’ll find more toxic misapprehensions about human interaction than in massively popular love songs. But as much as we may crave it and benefit from it, it’s also inher-ently disempowering to depend on the actions of others for emotional sustenance. When you’re trying to feel better it’s wise not to forgo any option that draws influence into your hands, so it’s best to do it yourself.
Vanessa Rossetto collected the sounds that make up The Way You Make Me Feel whilst in New York City to prepare for a concert. She was also, according to the text she has posted about this CD at the Unfathomless website, lapsing into a long depression. Recur-rent depressive episodes can be enormously disempowering, robbing sufferers of their ability to feel joy, think clearly, and to connect with people or even tolerate them. Ros-setto refrains from detailing her symptoms, but it’s worth noticing that until its final quarter this record is bereft of observable human interaction. In this respect its drastically different from Rossetto’s other recent recording, Adult Contemporary, which is full of collected voices. Those voices comment upon the sounds around them, they repeat me-chanically, they cough asthmatically, and they compete with distorted sounds coming out of loudspeakers. Whatever else they do, they fix the album’s action in the realm of human interaction.
By contrast, The Way You Make Me Feel opens with the sounds of a microphone being adjusted and a person shuffling about a room in apparent solitude. As “I Cut My Own” progresses you hear birds, machine hums, and evidence of human passage through space, but no interaction for a good five minutes. Then a male voice with an Australian accent slips into the audio environment for a second and disappears, replaced by an escalating swell of rattling metal and electronic whines. There’s a woman’s voice in there some-where singing to herself, distant and fragile. Rossetto projects the listener into a state of isolation, alone amongst the machines and wildlife. But she’s not really projecting you into a state of depression; the sounds are too emotionally uninflected. She might show you the experience of social distance, but she doesn’t make you feel it. This is not a fail-ure; it’s a triumph. For in separating portrayal from experience, she’s finding influence where she can and turning aside the cutting edge of something elusive but dangerous.
Bill Meyer
Dusted
In her quest to enhance the salient aspects of the musicality of ordinariness, Vanessa Rossetto maintains a nucleus of romantic pragmatism in association with gestures, sentences and combinations of familiar sounds. These snapshots of processed reality contain compositional germs and flashes of humanness in equal doses, situating the listener in the barren area that separates what was forgotten from what’s still vivid in the memory.
However, in The Way You Make Me Feel the Texas resident seems to have privileged the depiction of states deriving from a gathering of oppressive thoughts. The details of everyday are perceptible, but get vanquished by their very accumulation quite frequently. Elements that elsewhere could appear as merely decorative here become the origin of massive droning stratifications. A noble cacophony comprising imperfect shapes and urban untidiness, but also the sort of vaguely friendly echoes which keep us composed as everything gets tangled inside a surplus of cerebral activity. A few moments of tranquility are granted, yet the anxiety is palpable.
These tracks reveal the introvert attitude of a being whose conduct amidst a group of unknowns mixes circumspection and politeness. At the same instant, the aware mind is looking to escape from the obligations of social superficiality: to achieve that goal, one gets lost in the din while singling out the significant sonic particles and the small rays of light. Another day has passed, a measure of relief finally achieved. What will happen tomorrow is not a concern, at least for now.
Massimo Ricci
Touching Extremes
The Unfathomless Series continues to be the best ongoing series in the field recording industry, as proven by new entries from Flavien Gillié and Vanessa Rossetto. The sounds are always intriguing and the unified presentation ~ featuring art by Daniel Crokaert ~ contributes a memo-rable visual identity.
Vanessa Rossetto’s is inspired by the internal : specifically, the artist’s state of mind during a visit to New York City. Her poetic description of the process is akin to a diary entry and is well worth reading. During her stay, she attempted to record every minute, and afterward to “wind bits of straw into something resembling a form.” But as this time coincided with a severe bout of depression, she chose to concentrate not on the obvious sounds, but the sounds in-between ; the seemingly mundane, unimportant, fragmented or abandoned pieces of sonic debris that rested between the lead sonic stories. Those who have struggled with depression understand this ap-proach, as the big things are often too much, and the little things, seen and heard in macro, may be just enough. In this case, it means crackle and chirp, honk and holler, turnstile and ticket machine. Turn it up and it’s overwhelming, a fugue of amplified fury.
But here’s the rub. In the lowest part of her life, Rossetto managed to capture, and then ~ with obsessive concentration ~ organize a collection of dried breadcrumbs, something few others would dream of doing. The result is a set of intense and fragile beauty, a gift grown from seem-ingly depleted soil. To listen is to become aware of the lost and overlooked: a metaphor for Ros-setto’s condition as well as that of the city. The way you make me feel may be pure Rossetto, but it’s also as New York as Sinatra’s famous song. Speaking of songs, Michael Jackson does get his moment in the sun, albeit briefly; a moment of humor that lightens the tone and points the way from the subway to the street.
Richard Allen
A closer Listen
Over the years the name Vanessa Rossetto popped up a few times in Vital Weekly, although maybe once with a solo release, ‘Dogs In English Porcelain’ (see Vital Weekly 690), and as Hwaet (Vital Weekly 757) and Bright Duplex (Vital Weekly 680). Some of her work deals with improvisation, perhaps mainly when working with others, but her solo works can also be more composed, such as this new release, which entirely deals with field recordings made in New York from October 17 to November 5, 2014. If I understand the information that the label provides well, she almost continually kept recording sounds, save for those moments a SD card was full or batteries died. Rossetto was in New York preparing for a performance; I have no idea what kind of performance that was and if any or all any of those preparations were recorded and if so what part they play in the four pieces that are on this release. It seems from the same text she combed through all the material and found those bits that were quieter and moments of more rest. Action and dialogue were cut out. I am not sure what kind of processing methods are applied, if any at all, really, but it seems to me that Rossetto loves her more sustaining sounds, from ventilator shafts and other forms of electricity along with scratches from surfaces and pavements, which she collages together. Sometimes she uses the rapid editing to make a swift change in the music and than it may take some slower fading between events. For a noisy city like New York all of this sounds surprisingly mellow, I would think. One nowhere has the idea of that city anyway; or at least I didn’t think once about New York when I heard this, but it has been a while since I was last in that city, but I don’t think it has turned into a very a quiet place since. The pieces created by Rossetto are quite dark, I would think, and have a strangely captivating drone spell, such as in the title piece. This is a great CD, full of little surprises.
Frans de Waard
Vital Weekly