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- Zwoelfzungen#12 Gut te Fux ab te Fut
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- Alessandro Bosetti
Zwoelfzungen* - Alessandro Bosetti, 2006
I like to listen to languages I don't understand.
I like the moment when the understanding of words stops and every language starts to "make noise".
All languages have a special sound, some more than others developed particular acoustic characteristics for the delight of a musician's hears.
For "Zwoelfzungen" I recollected recordings of eleven languages I'm not, or partially, able to speak and understand. Eleven languages I met in the past years, whose sound I specially liked. Moreover I invented a twelvth one, developed and learned during the past year and featured as a last installment of the series.
I made a piece of music with each of them, escaping from the meaning of words and concentrating on his specific sound, letting my ears concentrate and developing all sound details I'll be captured by.
Those pieces are not intended as features or documentaries, while I'm not inserting any explanatory passage on the context they are coming from. I'm use whatever compositional technique the starting material is suggesting suggest to me : tape collage, electro-acoustic processing, max/msp, low-fi sound devices and perfromr them live mixing my voice with prerecorded and realtime mixed electro- acoustic materials. I feel free to "misunderstand" each one of those languuages as much as I can.
"Zwoelfzungen" has been commissioned by DeutschlandRadio Kultur for the 2006's "Ger?usch des Monats?.
*"Zwoelfzungen", in italian "Dodicilingue" could be translated as twelve languages as well as twelve tongues.
#12 Gut te Fux ab te Fut (Interstitial Shortwave language, a spoken by Alessandro Bosetti).
I used to belive for a long time that i was the only human being on the planet speaking I.S.L. since i belived i had invented this language by myself. Recently though i captured some radio broadcastings in that language. I felt very confused since i never taught I.S.L. to anybody before. Though, for some strange reason, there's somebody else speaking in I.S.L. out there.
It's a beautiful language that may slightly resemble to german. It's very melodic and has a virtually unlimited lexicon, words very seldom recurs in the same conversation.
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Piece Description
Zwoelfzungen* - Alessandro Bosetti, 2006 I like to listen to languages I don't understand. I like the moment when the understanding of words stops and every language starts to "make noise". All languages have a special sound, some more than others developed particular acoustic characteristics for the delight of a musician's hears. For "Zwoelfzungen" I recollected recordings of eleven languages I'm not, or partially, able to speak and understand. Eleven languages I met in the past years, whose sound I specially liked. Moreover I invented a twelvth one, developed and learned during the past year and featured as a last installment of the series. I made a piece of music with each of them, escaping from the meaning of words and concentrating on his specific sound, letting my ears concentrate and developing all sound details I'll be captured by. Those pieces are not intended as features or documentaries, while I'm not inserting any explanatory passage on the context they are coming from. I'm use whatever compositional technique the starting material is suggesting suggest to me : tape collage, electro-acoustic processing, max/msp, low-fi sound devices and perfromr them live mixing my voice with prerecorded and realtime mixed electro- acoustic materials. I feel free to "misunderstand" each one of those languuages as much as I can. "Zwoelfzungen" has been commissioned by DeutschlandRadio Kultur for the 2006's "Ger?usch des Monats?. *"Zwoelfzungen", in italian "Dodicilingue" could be translated as twelve languages as well as twelve tongues. #12 Gut te Fux ab te Fut (Interstitial Shortwave language, a spoken by Alessandro Bosetti). I used to belive for a long time that i was the only human being on the planet speaking I.S.L. since i belived i had invented this language by myself. Recently though i captured some radio broadcastings in that language. I felt very confused since i never taught I.S.L. to anybody before. Though, for some strange reason, there's somebody else speaking in I.S.L. out there. It's a beautiful language that may slightly resemble to german. It's very melodic and has a virtually unlimited lexicon, words very seldom recurs in the same conversation.
James Reiss
Posted on October 25, 2007 at 11:45 AM | Permalink
Review of Zwoelfzungen#12 Gut te Fux ab te Fut
Please let me tip my hat to producer Alessandro Bosetti, even though his sequence, "Zwoelfzungen," is as elusive and mind-boggling as it is fascinating.
I happen to be bilingual. I also know quite a few phrases in six or eight other far-flung languages. I've always loved listening to the intonations of exotic tongues. Overhearing the "wal ah ab"s of Arabic or the "bote achaa"s of Hindi, I've kidded myself that I understand what's being said.
Bless Bosetti, he doesn't care a fig or a tea leaf about the meaning of the eleven languages he uses in his uber-experimental series of pieces commissioned by DeutschlandRadio Kultur last year and uploaded onto PRX this October. These eleven languages include Mandarin Chinese as chanted slowly by Chen-How-He, in "Restless"; Dogan as spoken, giggled and shrieked by taciturn African women hauling loads of water in Mali, in "Jana"; and El Silbo, a language not spoken but whistled by a woman in La Gomera, the Canary Islands, in "Advertencia."
As to the piece under review here: the twelfth language Bosetti actually understands and lovingly includes in "Zwoelfzungen" ("Twelve Tongues" in German) is Interstitial Shortwave Language. I've never heard of I.S.L, and neither has Google. My guess is that I.S.L. is used by shortwave radio operators as a kind of Germanic lingua franca linking broadcasters from, say, Dusseldorf to Dar Es Salaam. The thing is, Bosetti backgrounds I.S.L., as he does every other language, with bits and snatches of synthesized electronic music scavenged from Lord knows where on the Internet. The result is a dozen musical offerings the likes of which I've never heard.
It's hard to imagine anyone listening to this stuff without wincing. Still, Bosetti moves decisively and ingeniously outside American public radio's commercial box in his presentation of speech sounds. Roll over, Beethoven: Bosetti's multilingual words are as musical and pure as moonlight.