Matthew Revert/Vanessa Rossetto - Earnest Rubbish (lossless)

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Lossless AIFF (16bit/44.1kHz) 

Erstwhile 079

Three extended compositions using field recordings and electronic processing from Vanessa Rossetto and Matthew Revert, using obscure references in song titles to mask subtle dovetailing and transitioning of concrete sound and mysterious tones.

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TRACK LIST

1.  Secret Celebrity Facebook Accounts (18:13)
2.  Minor Ox (7:02)
3.  Making a Documentary (14:50)

(released February 29, 2016)
CREDITS

mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi
design by Matthew Revert
produced by Jon Abbey
After a solo on Kye, the Australian writer Matthew Revert comes back with the American sound artist Vanessa Rossetto. Together they mostly work with field recordings, editing and mixing them in a narrative form, adding some texts and voices. Whereby two of the cutest cabbages in the cot create a soup unlike any other.


REVIEWS

Fluid radio
Matthew Revert and Vanessa Rossetto’s new album for Erstwhile Records comprises three tracks, each of which is constructed from a variety of field recordings, found sounds, and close-miced objects and instruments. Central to each of them seems to be the forming of a clearly defined space — not the expansive, abstract s p a a a a a c e of ambient music, nor the ‘literal’ illusion of a specific geographic location presented by some schools of field recording, but rather a more quotidian, everyday kind of space, one built up from innumerable small, mostly peripheral observations and interactions. Domestic interiors are presented through chinks of crockery and other small objects; outdoor environments take shape through diffuse urban sounds and voices of passersby, some of whom, with some bemusement, catch the field recordist red-handed in the act of recording them.

Many writers and artists have reflected on how our occupation and traversal of spaces consciously and unconsciously influences our behaviour and our sense of who we are. In her book “Atlas of Emotion”, Giuliana Bruno argues that film can be understood as a site of transit, as “a haptic experience that engages the body in the movement of desire, prompting both ongoing voyages of discovery and ceaseless returns home”. By means of this “tender mapping”, filmic spaces produce affects that are both motive and emotive, transporting us to realms both ‘real’ and ‘fictive’ as well as tracing the outlines of our daily habits and inner thoughts.

Bruno is proposing a particular perspective on cinema, but she could just as easily be describing “Earnest Rubbish”, particularly the ways in which the habitable and habitual are intimately connected to memory and feeling — just replace “film” with “audio”. It’s not so much that the sounds of an urban park, a spoon rattling in a cup, or snatches of salsa from a background radio evoke specific recollections — I taste no Proustian madeleine here. It’s more a matter of how spaces, be they concrete or represented, come to be through the juxtaposition of numerous small details, and how they are activated by means of occupying and transiting through them. This committed inhabiting and wandering is something that “Earnest Rubbish” pulls off very effectively and affectively.

I wouldn’t want to impose this as the sole frame through which to listen to this music, though. Revert and Rossetto are adroit enough to prevent the tracks from congealing or solidifying into any fixed, immutable thing, using devices such as TV and radio soundbites, snippets of banal conversation between themselves, and traditional musical elements such as the ascending and descending melody heard on ‘Making a Documentary’ to muddy the waters and defer final interpretation of their work. The pieces have their variations of intensity, repetitions and hearkenings-back, beginnings and endings just like one would expect from any piece of music.

I suppose many of Erstwhile’s recent releases have had some audibly sensible relation to space and place, be it along the lines of Graham Lambkin and Jason Lescallet’s intimate histories on “Photographs”, the location-based exploits (heck, let’s go ahead and call it psycho-phonography) of Toshiya Tsunoda and Manfred Werner’s “detour”, or the more abstract, dance-like explorations of space that characterise Michael Pisaro and Christian Wolff’s “Looking Around”. Revert and Rossetto’s collaboration (by my count, only the seventh record in Erstwhile’s 80-strong main catalogue to feature a woman artist) fits comfortably into this pattern, while drawing its own playful, habitable bounds — a space not just for exploring, but for living in.


Spin Magazine
On Earnest Rubbish, Melbourne’s Matthew Revert and the Austin-based Vanessa Rossetto subscribe to the Jeweled Antler Collective theory of sound, which insists that well-sourced and judiciously arranged field recordings can be as or more effective than traditional musical performance. Together, the pair carve out an intimate space larger and stranger than the sum of its available materials, reimagining the wider world as an extension of a studio laboratory.

In their reckoning, melody is ever-present and inescapable: ice rattling in a glass, specious drumming, chem-trailed flutes, passing strangers’ small talk, instruments being tuned or played softly, radio pop overheard. The collagers hint at the caustic, querulous compositions that populate their respective discographies while their microphones become characters in overlapping, impressionistic travelogues to nowhere — an open-air market placelessness that intoxicates.


Touching Extremes
Whoever’s tagged as an explorer of “the absurdity of everyday life and the hopelessness of being human” like Matthew Revert scores an advantage when matched with this reviewer. On the other side, Vanessa Rossetto is an inventive specimen endowed with sweetness, discernment and talent in equal doses. By tampering with the essential nature of relatively normal sounds recontextualized in a compositional framework, this duo has produced a work that is as straightforward as indisputably significant.

Beyond any individual response to Earnest Rubbish’s three tracks, these aural landscapes are painstakingly sculpted and orchestrated. This alone suffices to distance them from the brainless amassments thrown out on a weekly basis by indeterminate quantities of retrieved-from-the-dump pretenders. As democracy is dwindling everywhere except where it should – that is, the music world – it is comforting to observe someone who does not list sources and locations to hide creative paucity; the record’s intrigue is enhanced by this lack of “necessity to identify”. For the anal retentives, though, the acoustic cauldron comprises harshly resonating appliances, metallic shades, casual conversations, invasive urban clangor, the radiophonic ghosts of Norah Jones and Ben E. King, vague electronics, disjointed strings, deformed instrumental snippets, sinister repetitions of single words. The half-familiarity with the bulk of the material is what ultimately affects the psyche without turning points, slogans or shocks. Still, mentally evidencing some of the constituents while getting nearly overwhelmed by warped echoes of quotidian activities remains a good exercise.

Over the recent decades, progressive states of deterioration have decisively thwarted men in their quest for inner improvement. In a way, this could represent the logical soundtrack for that disheartening decay. We detect the misery of routine as opposed to the chimeras of true evolution; imagine the falsity of so-called reciprocal attention hiding personal aims in the desperate attempt of claiming “approval”. When it comes to surviving in difficult settings, here’s the secret: vociferous persons should be regarded as background noise. On the contrary, Revert and Rossetto transform what once was considered as such into a genuine form of art. However, the aforementioned people would not appreciate the effort, for this stuff needs a focused silence to be entirely comprehended. And human loudmouths fear silence like nothing else.