Review Summary: Rossetto's first proper misstep stultifies source material and foregrounds immediacy over replay value.
Gather around, wonks and pundits, as we consider today the grave cruelty inflicted on the word "jejune". An exquisite word, connoting an exotic tropicalia, aesthetically pleasant, the aspirated consonants at the forefront laced with honeyed smoothness, the "oon" sound yielding a satisfying tonal resolution. What meaning could such a word possibly have? Something at the very least pleasant, or applicable to a startling pair of eyes, or something?
In one of the only times the English language has betrayed me, it means nothing of the sort. "Dry, tedious or uninteresting" my dictionary (OED, naturally) drones. An abject outrage, as I wrote in a letter to my political representatives. A kind of brutal anti-onomatopoeia, meaning that this beautiful word will rarely be used in a beautiful way.
Finally, however, the word has found its apposite in Vanessa Rossetto's Fashion Tape.
The album cover is painted in bright pastel swathes, inviting and tantalizing; the quality of the field recordings here could have, in a different mood, been affixed and treated to represent an unyielding smorgasboard of the language of consumption in a clever, insidious way. Instead, the album enervates where it should enthrall, provokes disinterest at the time it should grab you by the throat.
As a sound practitioner Rossetto has worked in a vast array of genres and modes, segueing from chamber music to free improvisation to her more recent output as electroacoustic prodigy, a field in which she is widely and rightly respected, not in spite of but because her music is hard to pigeon-hole. There are no tapes more disparate than her Tracy Emin hellscape of deliquesce "Adult Contemporary" and her yearning, deeply moving experiments on "The Way You Make Me Feel", tapes released in the same year. The thrill of following Rossetto eagerly is bound in curiosity: what's she going to do next?
Pursuant: the album begins in unchartered territory, as a hynogogic loop recalling 80's work-out videos plays. The aesthetic, which recalls vaporwave and Ferraro's work at deconstructing muzak of the past to reveal limitations and recursions of the present, is foregrounded by an ominous overtone: "Hello. Welcome and please come in. This is a demo."
The hypnogogic pop angle makes sense, as Rossetto has shown the same concerns in her work (the nature of simulacra, the hyperreal hell where past cultural reference points have more meaning that our lived ones, the reduction of music to something conducive towards spending), but it is done here with ham resolutely clutched in fist. The beguiling opening soon gives way to trite decayed loops, a mass of voices that are meant to inspire unease as they conjure the consumeristic experience but instead inspire yawns. This then gives way to the sound of wind blowing on some lonely terrain and like, I get it, I've read the "veritable holocaust of the carpark" line, i get the emptiness that inevitably forms an epilogue to the spectacle of consumption, but it's done so obviously it borders on offense -- the compressed nature of the recordings here recalling not emptiness, other than in the most trite of ways, but of a bad sports live stream with crackles around the edges. Maybe that's the point, but I can't help but feel Rossetto is structuring some interesting material in such a linear way that there's no shock, nor surprise.
Elsewhere, Fashion Tape cleaves to established structures. There's the obligatory distressed, dissonant electronic jumble of Memphis Milano, the muddied field recordings of a social place on Radiant Green, but nothing new or conceptually engaging. The concluding track, which ropes in frequent collaborator Matthew Revert, is patient and decorous until it seizes up into a drone meant to act, I assume as harbinger of ill to come; instead, it only connotes the boredom of having to listen to the album again.
There is little of Rossetto's poise, talent for musical manipulation or textural nous on display here, and where it is extent it is misused in the context of whole. While I'm glad jejune finally has a bedfellow, I'm disappointed it was Rossetto who created it. This is one tape that shouldn't have been fashioned.
