Marina Rosenfeld

Deathstar (2017-2020)

The Deathstar project, between its first outing as a solo exhibition at Portikus, Frankfurt, in 2017 and the publication of the double album Deathstar in 2020, has comprised a recursive cycle of production and re-production: a series of versions and distortions that have explored the embodied, often dysphoric experience of listening, situating the body at the center of a series of technologically mediated encounters with a hyper-amplified soundfield.

The title of the Portikus exhibition, Deathstar, referred to an unrealized line of research conducted in the late nineties at the former experimental sound facility at Bell Labs/AT&T. Before it was abandoned, sound lab engineers explored the possibility of formalizing the subjective and transitory nature of sonic experience through a proprietary microphone configuration they nicknamed the “death star” after its globular shape. Using so-called “perceptual soundfield reconstruction,” the aimed to allow users to reproduce a subjective, sensory account of the experience of space, foregrounding something like a de-centered, high-fidelity subjectivity rather than portability and standardization, an alternative future where listening might be more closely tied to cognition and the body.

The exhibition Deathstar took up the idea of environmental recording but inserted it back into the more immediate and complex temporality of the gallery, which it co-opted as a site of continuous simultaneous recording and playback, a fluid acoustic environment where live and recorded sound were in a constant cycle of production and dispersal. As sounds were filtered and distorted by the concrete volume of the gallery, they were captured and returned immediately to a sound system in a subtle cascade of delays, rippling the soundfield of the gallery and mingling with amplified traces of visitors’ movements and other environmental disruptions. A visitor was immediately, perhaps uncomfortably, aware of her own and others’ susceptibility to and intervention within a feedback-prone system.

Part echo chamber, part unruly machine, the Deathstar ultimately achieved a kind of legibility through another recursive gesture, the conversion of its collected sound back into musical notation, which was first performed on March 31, 2017, in a 5-hour performance, by pianist Marino Formenti. In that sense sound was neither an abstraction nor a means to an end, but rather a material condition connected to the formation of music. The recordings that were generated within the volatile environment of the Deathstar—substantial periods of spectrally complex “room tone” punctuated by eruptions of vocality, fragmentary piano, footsteps or passing geese—in turn became the basis for a series of musical works, initially within the gallery, and later as Deathstar Orchestration and Deathstar (reduction). The “orchestration” was commissioned and performed by Ensemble Musikfabrik, for Donaueschingen Musiktage, with Formenti as soloist, in 2017; the “reduction” was premiered in 2019 by the Yarn/Wire ensemble for Time:Spans in New York, also with Formenti as soloist, once again enacting or re-enacting the deformed traces of his original performance. In each new iteration, the original exhibition’s temporal and indexical distortions are starkly reversed in concert space: the recursive and site-specific original is “concertized,” or made linear; it is also aggressively amplified, mirroring the acoustical distortion of the original site through a battery of noisy guitar amps. And performers are staged at fantastic distances from each other that aim to model or “re-perform” the actual physics of resonance and reflection that produced much of the work’s signature distortion in its original site. More on Deathstar Orchestration below. 

 Link: Portikus.de

Deathstar Orchestration (2017)

From Donaueschinger Musiktage festival book:

Deathstar, the title of Marina Rosenfeld's recent solo exhibition at Portikus (Frankfurt, Feb 17-April 16, 2017), referred to an unrealized line of research conducted in the late nineties in the last days of the sound laboratory at AT&T (formerly Bell Labs). Rosenfeld reconstructed a multimicrophone array associated with “perceptual soundfield reconstruction,” that is, a recording technique that aimed to reproduce a vivid, dimensional and experiential account of one acoustic space within another. For the artist, the “deathstar,” the abandoned device's informal nickname, pointed to an intriguing alternative technological future, where a potentially non-linear, de-centered subjectivity, tied to difference and the particularities of bodies, might have supplanted the coming emphasis on portability and standardization that fed into the rise of the cell phone. For the work, Rosenfeld took up the “deathstar" 's idea of environmental recording but inserted it back into a more immediate and complex temporality, that of the gallery, which was co-opted as a site of continuous, simultaneous recording and playback for the two-month duration of the exhibition. An audio score consisting of extended ‘silences’ punctuated by vocal utterances, noise and brief eruptions of electro-acoustic sound, was emitted at floor level, where it co-mingled with environmental noises (geese, visitors, traffic, bells) and entered the system via the microphone array high overhead, which returned both a version of the original signal and its many distortions and reflections back into the loudspeakers below; the result was a continuous and recursive acoustic environment where composition was understood to be in process at all times. A 5-hour performance by pianist Marino Formenti near the close of the exhibition further extended the work’s temporal  and indexical distortions: Formenti’s interpretation of the composer’s notated transcriptions of the exhibition’s sonic content entered the space for further re-uptake and dispersal.

For Donaueschingen, Rosenfeld has performed a continuation -- but also a kind of violation -- of the cyclical recursivity of the Portikus project, reinserting the fluid, unpredictable, continuous, and self-propagating machine-state of the deathstar -- an apparatus she co-opted from its historical obscurity for just this purpose -- back into the publicness of the generic concert hall. Her orchestration, of a 30-minute outtake from the exhibition’s large body of recorded traces, addresses the excessive and locationally contingent signal from the previous installation through notation -- where noise has accumulated and is therefore untranscribable, large frequency spreads are indicated graphically through hand-drawn line; where variation has been introduced by the apparatus, new notes appear -- as well as through staging. Her orchestration is itself an evocation of excess, an ego-trip, a gesture associated with the phase of a band's lifespan, for example, that includes the stadium and a need for the expanded palette afforded by orchestral instruments in their colorfullness and variety. In this vein, a wall of sound approach is also required here, where guitar amps instead of standard concert amplification are necessary to signify that the orchestration belongs to the register of excess and to “classical music” understood as an event within a chronology, as well as a genre that conserves and historicizes.

While the Portikus exhibition played with the idea of reproducing one space inside another, Deathstar Orchestration refuses this idea. Instead the work asserts an identity that is itself distributed. The positions of interpretation -- and interpreter -- are contingent and relative; score, notation, recording and performer are of equal valence in the same sense that the machinic process of reinscription modeled and performed by the deathstar makes no distinction between pianist, passing goose, scored event, or visitor footsteps. The problem of indeterminacy -- ie. the question of versions, and ultimately of singularity -- is re-articulated as a problem of data, rather than a ‘value’ or an ‘ideal’ associated with an earlier idea of the experimental or the new.

“[Curator] Gottstein wants to yet again reinvent the wheel, this time under a motto made up of no less than three well-worn topics: women, technology, new concert forms. This was perfectly achieved, though only once. In New York sound-artist Marina Rosenfeld's furious and romantic ‘Deathstar Orchestration,’ the latest offshoot of an exhibition project, ‘historical’ sound reconstructions are the chosen material. Beautiful, old-fashioned guitar amps gleam on the edge of the stage, planted frontally as in a classical concert situation. Behind them, the Ensemble Musikfabrik sings and whispers, a strong voltage hum roaring throughout the room. And little by little, a sort of flourish-crazed Liszt (Marino Formenti) joins these plural conjurations of pasts, working at a piano behind the audience, slowly bending the entire thing into a ‘piano concerto.’”  — Eleonore Büning, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, October 24, 2017