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2LP
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SHELTER 124LP
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Since 2017, Deathstar has been a project about the microphone -- in Marina Rosenfeld's hands, a void, a mirror, an unruly instrument of transformation and mediation. This music is heard in traces, through thickly amplified silences punctuated by momentary eruptions of noise or a voice at the threshold of intelligibility. The sculpture at the center of the action -- a plexiglas orb housing a seven-microphone array originally installed as part of an exhibition the artist mounted at Portikus, in Frankfurt Germany -- performs a recursive operation, listening to and recirculating sounds continuously morphed by feedback and reflection. This machine music repeats itself in seemingly endless versions, abstractly and in an evolving relationship to the grammars of reproduction and performance, presence, absence, and accumulation. Later, recorded traces of this installation rendered as musical notation produce a series of events -- concerts that explore the outcomes of the acts of amplifying, writing, and listening. The four sides of the album Deathstar follow four such events: first, the installation of the Deathstar in exhibition space; then, a piano performance, also within the Deathstar's machinic environment, of a recording of the installation that Rosenfeld notated on paper; then, her re-notation of these recorded traces in the form of a concerto for piano and chamber orchestra, all aggressively amplified through a wall of guitar amps; and finally, the orchestration's reduction to something like chamber music, with acoustic instruments tasked with the representation of an ever more attenuated body of traces. Throughout, the extraordinary virtuoso pianist Marino Formenti and ensembles MusikFabrik (Cologne) and Yarn/Wire (New York) extract a dazzling variety of sounds from their readings of the work's written and acoustic forms. Deathstar is a complex and monumental work from a composer who has long explored the limits of form as an artist and as a listener.
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LP
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RM 452LP
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Restocked, last copies. On P.A./Hard Love, New York-based composer and conceptual sound artist Marina Rosenfeld generates an esoteric universe of radical sonic collisions. Developed initially in 2009, the album draws its roots following a series of idiosyncratic quasi-sculptural sound-system installations Rosenfeld installed in various disused and monumental sites including New York's Park Avenue Armory and Liverpool's Renshaw Hall car park. The music she composed for these installations was heterogeneous, repositioning resident noise from the sites (re-projected back into the sites via horns), her own voice and generous yet subtle electroacoustic elements. The results were more "tuned" atmosphere than active performance and sought to explore the potent combination of voice, amplification and space; playing with reflection and distortion, intelligibility, fantasies of publicness and broadcast. In 2012 Rosenfeld reached out to Annette Henry, aka Warrior Queen, and invited her to contribute original vocals to the project. The vocal contributions acted as a catalyst for the works; propelling the pre-existing compositions into new and unexpected directions. In combination with virtuoso cellist Okkyung Lee, the material was transplanted from live settings to the studio and transformed by a process of radical iteration. The resulting music asks questions of form, expectation and contemporary sound practices. P.A./Hard Love reveals the contingent nature of collaboration; something beautiful and complicated, and ultimately it's these relationships that form a kind of halfway point between conceptual art and contemporary music. It's in these in-between spaces that delicate, shimmering and ephemeral sounds can exist harmoniously with dissonant, abrasive, dark and complex audio states that are both explicit and ambiguous, anthemic and elusive. Limited vinyl edition of 500 copies housed in a gorgeous matte cello-glazed sleeve.
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