{"id":725202,"date":"2026-06-09T13:22:10","date_gmt":"2026-06-09T13:22:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/725202\/"},"modified":"2026-06-09T13:22:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-09T13:22:10","slug":"vanessa-rossetto-the-professional-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/725202\/","title":{"rendered":"Vanessa Rossetto: The Professional Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first thing you hear on Vanessa Rossetto<\/a>\u2019s The Professional is something you\u2019ve probably never heard before: a Tin Pan Alley\u2013style ditty about making experimental music. The lyrics, written by Michael Garin, are replete with references to \u201cteacups in Riga\u201d and \u201crecording cabbage in a baggage carousel.\u201d Sung by Mardie Millet with the vaudevillian verve of Ethel Merman bellowing an ode to the glittering lights of Broadway, it\u2019s a wryly humorous take on the often humorless world of experimental music\u2014and on the complicated position of being a musician whose work is unrecognizable to most people as music.<\/p>\n

Vanessa Rossetto has built her entire artistic practice out of subverting listeners\u2019 expectations. Quotidian sounds such as traffic, bleeping devices, or pop music overheard in crowded spaces make up much of the source material for her expansive sound collages. But unlike the classically schooled pioneers of musique concr\u00e8te, the New Orleans-raised artist has no formal musical background whatsoever. Initially trained as a painter, Rossetto only gradually drifted into working with sound through interactions with musicians online and within Austin\u2019s DIY scene. Her approach to sound collage is deeply idiosyncratic, influenced by her concr\u00e8te forebearers but untethered from the rigidities of conservatory training.<\/p>\n

No score yet, be the first to add.<\/p>\n

Rossetto\u2019s previous release, last year\u2019s Pictures of the Warm South, was largely sourced from recordings of her late mother that Rossetto made as she helped her prepare to move into an assisted living facility. During that time, Rossetto received an offer to perform in Geneva, and though she had played few shows over the course of her entire career, at her mother\u2019s urging, she embarked on her first-ever tour of Europe, field recorder in hand. That trip provided the source material for The Professional, a circuitous fish-out-of-water travelogue that serves as a meditation on the contradictions of performing music as a non-musician.<\/p>\n

Rossetto\u2019s approach is characteristically dry, drawing emotional depth from repetition and the layering of recordings rather than abstract manipulations of sound. On \u201cl\u2019enseignante,\u201d the sounds of running water, muffled conversation, and electro music converge in uncanny fashion, both familiar and mysterious. \u00c1ine O\u2019Dwyer\u2019s hauntingly elegiac piano hovers distantly in the backdrop of \u201cde geest\u201d while street scenes play out in the foreground. Even at its most ambiguous, The Professional lets its sound sources speak for themselves, never fully breaking away from the material context of their creation.<\/p>\n

One of the catalysts for The Professional was a performance at the Jauna Muzika festival in Lithuania, whose theme for that year was one Rossetto identifies wholeheartedly with\u2014\u201cthe amateur.\u201d Performing a collage of recordings of internet friends singing their favorite songs, she invited members of the audience to join in and sing at will. That event marks the point of departure for \u201cthe amateur,\u201d a 30-minute phantasmagoria of disembodied singing voices, clustered soundscapes, and heavenly reverberations.<\/p>\n

Similar recordings of Rossetto\u2019s introductions of various performances on tour, such as one in which she hands recording devices to audience members and instructs them to explore and record the space themselves, are peppered throughout The Professional. They provide a sort of narrative thread across the album\u2019s ever-shifting sonic landscape, not necessarily demystifying her creative process so much as they invite the listener to join her in the mystery.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The first thing you hear on Vanessa Rossetto\u2019s The Professional is something you\u2019ve probably never heard before: a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":725203,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[342,49,48,75,341,343],"class_list":["post-725202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-albums","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=725202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725202\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/725203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=725202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=725202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=725202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}