U62 | Vanessa Rossetto | self-care
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format : CD ltd to 200 hand numbered copies/Digital
Regular edition of 150 copies packaged in clear vinyl sleeve with folded insert + an additional art card both on 350gr satin paper
Special ultra ltd edition of 50 copies Packaged in black mass–tinted cardboard digisleeve with frame. It holds a set of 2 double-sided art cards with a different artwork from the regular edition on 350gr satin paper + an additional set of 3 photos.
Digisleeve comes in a resealable cello.
release year : 2020
length : 58’44
track : self-care
status : still available
>>> order via Paypal : chalkdc@unfathomless.net
Regular edition
(Belgium) : 14 € (inc.postage)
(Europe) : 15 € (inc.postage)
(World) : 16 € (inc.postage)
Special ultra ltd edition SOLD OUT !
(Belgium) : 17 € (inc.postage)
(Europe) : 18 € (inc.postage)
(World) : 19 € (inc.postage)
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: info :
Self-care is made up of documentation of a three day trip to San Francisco in the fall of 2018. I spent the majority of my time there in a pleasant rented room where I left the recorder running and examined elements of my relationship with my own corporeality.
(Vanessa Rossetto, November 2019)
: reviews :
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Self-Care: an intimate cinematic sound diary of a three-day trip in San Francisco
Recorded over three days in September 2018, during which time sound artist Vanessa Rossetto was staying in San Francisco and renting a room there, this album is a document of Rossetto’s SF trip. She left the recorder running in the room where she spent most of her time exploring, in her words, her “relationship with [her] own corporeality”. The result is very intimate, even a bit voyeuristic and perhaps confronting for the listener, though the work has much less Sturm und Drang than might be expected of an artist who in the past has battled depression and who later holes up in a room for three days in SF. At least Rossetto admits the room was “pleasant” and I’m sure San Francisco is (or was in 2018) one of the better cities in the United States to spend a few days living there.
For the first 30 minutes the recording seems to spend a lot of time getting its bearings, and fragments of conversations that might have been better left out surface now and again, but after the 30th minute the recording finds its (slightly grating groove) and sets off at a steady pace going somewhere – even if that turns out to be turning around in circles (literally of course, in the case of the CD). From then on, even though the hypnotic soothing drone sound stops and the recording assumes its cinematic auto-documentary narrative of self-examination and questioning one’s direction in life, the whole work feels and stays secure, and continues on an even keel.
I confess to feeling a bit intrusive, like a Peeping Tom, listening to this very intimate recording. Parts of it could have been edited for length as there can be long stretches where nothing seems to happen. (Though those periods are probably when listeners need to be most attentive.) The sections where actual music can be heard are often very intense, highly focused and seem to be the most self-revealing. The second half of the recording after the 30th minute is the more interesting part of the work with hypnotic droning tones that absorb all attention and concentrate the mind on what may happen next. A water theme begins and ends the album, and has its culmination in a shower midway through the work, suggesting perhaps a ritual nature to Rossetto’s daily routines during her SF stay.
This won’t be a very accessible recording for most people who would be flummoxed by the notion of an artist recording three days’ worth of sounds and samples as a snapshot of her interior life. Perhaps “Self-Care” is best recommended to Rossetto’s fans.
Nausika/Jennifer Hor
The Sound Projector
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Like Graham Lambkin, Áine O’Dwyer and Jason Lescalleet, sound artist Vanessa Rossetto does not confine herself to the documentation of remarkable events ; the quotidian and the random often become material for her work. In 2014 the recordings she made of the down time during her visit to play a concert in New York in 2014 documented not only the milieu of a significant moment in her career, but the onset of an episode of depression. The way you make me feel, her first album for the Unfathomless label, gathered moments of that sojourn and fashioned them into a sonic expression of isolation, transition, and the ability that sound has to induce emotional experiences.
Released on the same label and drawn from the auditory record of a trip she made four years later to appear at the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, self-care is its companion. But while The way you make me feel dealt in part with its composer’s mental health, self-care faces the physical.
Rossetto lodged at an Airbnb walk-up apartment, and the first four minutes of the album consist of the room’s sounds. Traffic hums through a window, objects shift on a table, and over it all, water drips from a tap into a partially filled glass. Then Rossetto’s voice enters the space, chatting with various parties on her phone.
The piece follows her as she heads out into the street, where she encounters snatches of passing music and a car alarm nearly as insistent as that tap. When she returns to her room, her troubles begin. She muses to herself about an unhealed injury to her leg while said injury turns a too-tall bed into a nearly insurmountable obstacle. Key words in the narrative pivot the action away from her voice and into passages of pentimento sound collage, but the piece keeps coming back to Rossetto talking through her reactions to being unable to climb into bed, and then being reluctant to leave it once she’s there. It takes over three quarter of an hour to get to a bit of electronic sound, which builds to a brief, intense surge before yielding once more to that dripping tap.
Don’t ever let anyone tell you that playing at an experimental music festival is all glamour and excitement.
Bill Meyer
The Wire – April 2020 (issue 434)
Unfathomless 