Marina Rosenfeld - Joy Of Fear (2020/2005)

“Composer, musician, artist and turntablist Marina Rosenfeld is based in New York City. Her music includes large, multi-player performances involving custom playing techniques, graphic scores, visual elements, costumes and improvisation by both musicians and non-musicians; electro-acoustic sound installations for multiple speakers; and solo and ensemble compositions involving acoustic instruments, turntables and electronics.

"On turntables Marina Rosenfeld plays exclusively her own custom acetate records ('dub plates') and performs frequently as an improviser in the U.S. and Europe. Her music has been commissioned and/or presented by numerous U.S. galleries, museums and theaters, including by the Whitney Museum of American Art, Artists Space, Creative Time, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Mills College, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and by many festivals here and abroad, including Donaueschingen, Ars Electronica, Musikprotokoll, Pro Musica Nova, Maerz Musik, Mutek, and The Wire's Adventures in Modern Music, among others.

The pieces for "Joy of Fear" were composed using a computer, a turntable, cello, piano and several years' worth of one-off acetate records, or dub plates, which I make as a kind of ongoing audio diary (Richard Simpson in Los Angeles has been indispensable to my project since I first encountered him and his lathe in 1997.)

An aspect of this way of working is that the sound on the records is in a continual process of intermingling with the material of the plate itself, which, like memory and music, is unstable and subject to transformation with time and handling.

Another is the clumsiness, the furniture-ness of the record player, whose history of pleasure and invention recasts the sublime of cello&piano as party favor, maybe, or science. The music on this disc is fixed (for the time being), but its allegiance is to the live, the freely improvised, the ephemeral, the raw, the breathlessly confronted.”