Marina Rosenfeld - Plastic Materials

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4...according to our Phil on Fri 13 Nov, 2009.

I always quite enjoy the releases on Room 40 these days. They're always pretty avant garde but as I'm getting older and my ears are needing something new and interesting and the label's output is keeping them reasonably sweet. The new CD 'Plastic Materials' by Marina Rosenfeld is certainly interesting. Plastic Materials 9 tracks all sound very earth and organic. Lots of vocals all layered, coming out at different points at different volumes. a laugh here, an arrrr there, some words somewhere else. I suspect it's the soundtrack of a paranoid schizophrenics brain. Accompanying the interesting and sporadic vocals are weird hums and bits of static which are entirely drawn from hand crafted dub plates. It's an interesting one this...parts of it are completely off its tits and other bits are thoroughly coherent and lovely sounding. It's certainly an album to keep you occupied for a number of hours as the content is so rich it will keep you busy for an eon while while you get your head around what's going on. Excellent!

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Over the past decade, Marina Rosenfeld’s work has come to represent one of the most progressive approaches to experimental sound emanating from New York.

Rosenfeld is equally known as a composer for large-scale performances and groundbreaking turntablist. Her sonic palette - entirely drawn from hand-crafted dub plates she imprints with blips of vinyl static, bursts of instrumental noise, conversation, and other audio detritus - evokes both the ecstatic electronic artifice of early electronic composers like Morton Subotnik and the post-punk ferocity of Kim Gordon.

On Plastic Materials, Rosenfeld creates a compelling and dense journey through ringing, magical electroacoustic structures that are carefully overlaid with piano, voice and deconstructed language. Her compositions evoke both the radical poetics of modernism and free improv and, with it's delicate underlay of hiss, vinyl static and other aural signifiers of recording, the unlikely preservation of the ephemeral made possible by vinyl.

“Cuz’ I Cannot Find My Way,” “Hey, Girl,” and “I Treated Myself” are excerpted from “Teenage Lontano”, Rosenfeld’s acclaimed "cover version" for teenaged choir, of György Ligeti’s 1967 orchestral masterpiece Lontano, premiered by the Whitney Museum in New York in 2008.

PRESS (Various)

“I felt the opening of a portal between a failed utopian past and the possibility that the more real present is already something to love. I was transported.”
New York Magazine (review of Teenage Lontano)

“Brilliant… haunting… a heady mix of the strange and the familiar…The way in which Rosenfeld succeeded in transforming what is in essence an antisocial behaviour (listening to an iPod) into the social activity of singing together, into self-expression, transparency and vulnerability, was almost heartbreaking....’
Theater of Found Sounds (review of Teenage Lontano)

“Seminal”
Rhizome (on Sheer Frost Orchestra)