marina rosenfeld: p.a./hard love

On P.A./Hard Love, New York-based composer and conceptual sound artist Marina Rosenfeld generates an esoteric universe of radical sonic collisions. Developed initially in 2009, the album draws its roots following a series of idiosyncratic quasi-sculptural sound-system installations Rosenfeld installed in various disused and monumental sites including New York's Park Avenue Armory and Liverpool's Renshaw Hall car park. The music she composed for these installations was heterogeneous, repositioning resident noise from the sites (re-projected back into the sites via horns), her own voice and generous yet subtle electroacoustic elements. The results were more "tuned" atmosphere than active performance and sought to explore the potent combination of voice, amplification and space; playing with reflection and distortion, intelligibility, fantasies of publicness and broadcast. In 2012 Rosenfeld reached out to Annette Henry, aka Warrior Queen, and invited her to contribute original vocals to the project. The vocal contributions acted as a catalyst for the works; propelling the pre-existing compositions into new and unexpected directions. In combination with virtuoso cellist Okkyung Lee, the material was transplanted from live settings to the studio and transformed by a process of radical iteration. The resulting music asks questions of form, expectation and contemporary sound practices. P.A./Hard Love reveals the contingent nature of collaboration; something beautiful and complicated, and ultimately it's these relationships that form a kind of halfway point between conceptual art and contemporary music. It's in these in-between spaces that delicate, shimmering and ephemeral sounds can exist harmoniously with dissonant, abrasive, dark and complex audio states that are both explicit and ambiguous, anthemic and elusive. Limited vinyl edition of 500 copies housed in a gorgeous matte cello-glazed sleeve.