The first thing you hear on Vanessa Rossetto’s The Professional is something you’ve probably never heard before: a Tin Pan Alley–style ditty about making experimental music. The lyrics, written by Michael Garin, are replete with references to “teacups in Riga” and “recording cabbage in a baggage carousel.” Sung by Mardie Millet with the vaudevillian verve of Ethel Merman bellowing an ode to the glittering lights of Broadway, it’s a wryly humorous take on the often humorless world of experimental music—and on the complicated position of being a musician whose work is unrecognizable to most people as music.
Vanessa Rossetto has built her entire artistic practice out of subverting listeners’ 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 concrète, 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’s DIY scene. Her approach to sound collage is deeply idiosyncratic, influenced by her concrète forebearers but untethered from the rigidities of their conservatory training.
Rossetto’s previous release, last year’s 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’s 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.
Rossetto’s approach is characteristically dry, drawing emotional depth from repetition and the layering of recordings rather than abstract manipulations of sound. On “l’enseignante,” the sounds of running water, muffled conversation, and electro music converge in uncanny fashion, both familiar and mysterious. Áine O’Dwyer’s hauntingly elegiac piano hovers distantly in the backdrop of “de geest” 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.
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—“the amateur.” 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 “the amateur,” a 30-minute phantasmagoria of disembodied singing voices, clustered soundscapes, and heavenly reverberations.
Similar recordings of Rossetto’s 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’s ever-shifting sonic landscape, not necessarily demystifying her creative process so much as they invite the listener to join her in the mystery.
Musique concrète is often referred to as a moving picture for the ear, a description that feels especially pertinent given Rossetto’s longstanding interest in theater and performance. The Professional can certainly be understood as a nonlinear narrative of an artist on the peripheries of music, navigating a world far from home with equal parts amusement and bemusement. But the filmic quality of the album lies less in any conventionally cinematic progression and more in Rossetto’s ability to imbue even the most rudimentary sounds with vivid detail and perspective. It’s hardly the kind of entertainment Judy Garland may have had in mind, but regardless, on The Professional, all the world’s a stage.
