Marina Rosenfeld

GREATEST HITS (2016)

Greatest Hits: A Reproduction was conceived for the Guggenheim Museum rotunda as part of a program of live music for the exhibition "Moholy-Nagy: Optical Sound" in 2016. The first performance was a duo with drummer Greg Fox. Later performances at Qubit New York and PS1 MoMA saw Eli Keszler joining the drum section, making the work a trio. In November 2023, the work is coming out on Berlin-based INFO Utld. records (link coming soon!).

The score for GREATEST HITS, is a translation into numerical patterns of the daily playlist of all of Rosenfeld’s dub plates created for an earlier exhibition: see Turn of My Century/Dub Plates and Test Pressings, 1997-2014. Using the numbers 1 through 7 as they occur in the playlist’s dates, times of day, and ‘a’ or ‘b’ side indications, the drummers convert these into polyrhythmic and technically virtuosic patterns and sequences in real time. Buttressed lightly by Rosenfeld’s own passage through the playlist (without regard to the score’s rules), the drummers’ produce shimmering stochastic textures that begin to resemble the surface noise of the dub plates themselves.