marina rosenfeld: index

For over two decades, New York-based artist and composer Marina Rosenfeld has pioneered a specific language for turntable music, based on an ever-expanding collection of dub plates she creates. The dubplate is a one-off, hand-cut record. Each dubplate can be made to contain any array of sounds decided on by its creator. For Rosenfeld, her discovery of the dubplate in the late 1990s was a pivotal moment, when she recognized the material instability of the medium as critical tool for performance and composition. On Index, the investigation of this materiality is paramount. The physical intimacy that colors the relation between the hand and the plate is revealed through a very particular reading of the turntable, one which sits in parallel to the more recognized ways in which that technology has been deployed as a performative tool. This edition features a series of live recordings and related materials that trace the development of Rosenfeld's tactile approach and her shifting collection of sound materials. The recordings are published alongside a book featuring extensive archival documentation, photography, and a longform conversation between Marina Rosenfeld and Lawrence English. Marina Rosenfeld on the dub plates: "I don't care that much about the alchemy that some artists generate combining LPs, communicating with the ghosts of the past, that kind of thing. I love it when other people do it. In my own case, I'm really interested in the materiality of the plate, the tactile and hyper sensitive way sound is extracted from it, the signal to noise ratio and its condition of radical flux that you get with dub plates. What I'm doing there is adjacent to music-making, but I often think it might not be strictly speaking, about getting to the best sound, if that's what musicians are understood to be doing, by and large. My approach has something of carrying out exercises to it, to what end I'm not entirely sure, but on a personal level, I would say, some strange synthesis of formalism and kind of physical intimacy."