Vanessa Rossetto returns to ErstSolo with The Professional, a double CD that takes the figure of the amateur as both formal occasion and conceptual question. The album grew out of Rossetto's 2025 European tour and, in particular, a performance at the Jauna Muzika festival in Vilnius, whose edition was themed around amateur practice. For the occasion Rossetto assembled recordings of people singing their favourite songs, prepared a backing track, and set up microphones so that audience members could come up and perform live: a thirty-minute piece she was prepared to carry alone, but that the room kept filling for her, one stranger after another. Out of those nights, supplemented by field recordings gathered along the route (titles in Lithuanian, French and Dutch quietly trace the itinerary), The Professional takes shape as a record about untrained voices and the spaces they pass through, and about what an artist does when she chooses to organise rather than perform.

The original meaning of amateur is, of course, a lover of something, and Rossetto has long worked in this etymological grain. Trained as a painter, she came to sound late, in her late thirties, not through music school but through the slow accretion of recordings made around her own apartment, and her compositional method has remained painterly ever since: hundreds of layered fragments, semi-translucent, building toward a final image you can still see through. She has spoken about sketching the geometry of a piece in a notebook before starting, and about working at microscopic scale, "every single bit individually placed". What sometimes reads as drift is in fact the surface of an extreme intentionality. The other half of the method is her insistence on the human: against the convention that asks the field recordist to disappear, Rossetto wants the hand of the creator visible everywhere, the bumped recorder, the closing door, the car going past with its radio on, the unintentional more interesting than the planned. The Professional takes that ethic further than usual, because here the recorded voice is not overheard but invited, named, and handed the microphone.

The album works like a long-form radio play, a form Rossetto has cited as central to her current thinking. Across nine tracks, voices accumulate and dissolve: amateur singers, fragments of conversation, instrumental interjections, the ambient grain of the rooms in between. The Mary Ann de Antiquis Memorial Amateur Fair Use Choir, the name Rossetto has given her audience-singers (credited across the inner sleeve one first name at a time), is the gravitational centre of the record, but the architecture also makes room for Michael Garin and Mardie Millit's piano-and-voice opener profesionali tema (music and lyrics by Garin), Rada Hadjikostova's violin on won't do anything, and Áine O'Dwyer's piano on de geest. The sequence quietly inverts the usual relation between professional and amateur: the practitioner is the one whose name appears on the cover; the lovers of song are the ones who make it.

Produced by Jon Abbey, mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi, designed by longtime collaborator Matthew Revert. The Professional follows The Actress (2022) and Pictures Of The Warm South in Rossetto's ErstSolo run, and is perhaps her most exposed and openhearted work to date: a record about handing the microphone over, about loving an artform enough to share its tools, and about the strange dignity of the amateur voice when a composer arranges a room around it.