Marina Rosenfeld

My body (2019)

My Body, a commission of the 2019 Time:Spans festival, oriented the actions of the New York-based Yarn/Wire ensemble (2 pianists, 2 percussionists) around a suite of custom dub plates, the. acetate-coated LPs that have been a longstanding material and form in my practice. The plates house seven bands of pre-composed sound materials—mostly short vocal ‘utterances’ made via synthesizer—that are the basis for a set of 8 variations. Each variation is both a social and musical occasion, requiring a distinct, intensive mode of active listening, of addressing collaboration, of tracking the transformations of playback and decay, and ultimately of foregrounding the sociality of collective listening. The eighth variation sees the ensemble recreating the acoustic signature of the plate itself by rubbing small stones together in imitation of LP surface noise.

From the Time:Spans 2020 program book: “I’ve been creating dub plates as a corollary to my composition practice for over twenty years; as an archive, they track all of my larger works since the late 1990s and have been the basis for both improvised music and composed works structured around the aesthetics of turntablism and musical collectivism. As objects, they represent a quasi-improvisational, quasi-compositional register of music-making, where their singularity and fragility— and especially, their tendency to decline rapidly in fidelity as they are played—and their responsiveness to acoustic conditions stand, for me, as representative of my longstanding affiliation to listening closely to material instability.”