Vanessa Rossetto

Part of our mission, here at SoundOhm, is shining light on remarkable and ambitious efforts, issued by small imprints in tiny editions that might otherwise be overlooked. It goes without saying that the scale of availability, economy, and distribution rarely reflects the towering potential of an artist's work. Before us is one such case - the latest release, Self-care, by American composer, improviser, and painter, Vanessa Rossetto, issued by Unfathomless in two beautiful and very limited editions.

Primarily focused on composing works that draw on a diverse pallet of chamber instrumentation, field recordings, electronics and a wide array of different objects, with a practice that explores each through a combination of extended and traditional techniques, Vanessa Rossetto has been working at the boundaries of the American vanguard for well over a decade, producing beautiful and challenging solo efforts for a diverse number of imprints, including Kye, Another Timbre, No Rent, Erstwhile, and numerous others, as well as collaborations with figures like Michael Pisaro, Sarah Hennies, and Lee Patterson.

Self-care, her latest solo effort, belongs to Unfathomless' mission to produce phonographies that reflect the the aural resonances of a specific place and those associated memories.
The album was created by Rossetto during a three day trip to San Francisco during the Autumn of 2018, during which she spent the majority of her time in a rented room. To build a body of material through which to construct the resulting work, she left a recorder running, amassing a temporarily and spatially constrained series of field recordings that reflected the artist's relationship with her own corporeality.

The result is a bristling expanse of environmental texture and incident, within which Rossetto's voice and thoughts occasionally penetrates, slowing building across its duration into a moody sonic space of startling psychological depth. Visionary, challenging and beautiful, pushing the potentiality of organized sound incrementally ahead, Self-care is unquestionably one of the most engaging releases we've heard so far this year.