Marina Rosenfeld

Deathstar (2017-2020)

The Deathstar project, between its first outing as a solo exhibition at Portikus, Frankfurt, in 2017 and the publication of the double album Deathstar in 2020, has comprised a recursive cycle of production and re-production: a series of versions and distortions that have explored the embodied, often dysphoric experience of listening, situating the body at the center of a series of technologically mediated encounters with a hyper-amplified soundfield.

The title of the Portikus exhibition, Deathstar, referred to an unrealized line of research conducted in the late nineties at the former experimental sound facility at Bell Labs/AT&T. Before it was abandoned, sound lab engineers explored the possibility of formalizing the subjective and transitory nature of sonic experience through a proprietary microphone configuration they nicknamed the “death star” after its globular shape. Using so-called “perceptual soundfield reconstruction,” the aimed to allow users to reproduce a subjective, sensory account of the experience of space, foregrounding something like a de-centered, high-fidelity subjectivity rather than portability and standardization, an alternative future where listening might be more closely tied to cognition and the body.

The exhibition Deathstar took up the idea of environmental recording but inserted it back into the more immediate and complex temporality of the gallery, which it co-opted as a site of continuous simultaneous recording and playback, a fluid acoustic environment where live and recorded sound were in a constant cycle of production and dispersal. As sounds were filtered and distorted by the concrete volume of the gallery, they were captured and returned immediately to a sound system in a subtle cascade of delays, rippling the soundfield of the gallery and mingling with amplified traces of visitors’ movements and other environmental disruptions. A visitor was immediately, perhaps uncomfortably, aware of her own and others’ susceptibility to and intervention within a feedback-prone system.

Part echo chamber, part unruly machine, the Deathstar ultimately achieved a kind of legibility through another recursive gesture, the conversion of its collected sound back into musical notation, which was first performed on March 31, 2017, in a 5-hour performance, by pianist Marino Formenti. In that sense sound was neither an abstraction nor a means to an end, but rather a material condition connected to the formation of music. The recordings that were generated within the volatile environment of the Deathstar—substantial periods of spectrally complex “room tone” punctuated by eruptions of vocality, fragmentary piano, footsteps or passing geese—in turn became the basis for a series of musical works, initially within the gallery, and later as Deathstar Orchestration and Deathstar (reduction). The “orchestration” was commissioned and performed by Ensemble Musikfabrik, for Donaueschingen Musiktage, with Formenti as soloist, in 2017; the “reduction” was premiered in 2019 by the Yarn/Wire ensemble for Time:Spans in New York, also with Formenti as soloist, once again enacting or re-enacting the deformed traces of his original performance. In each new iteration, the original exhibition’s temporal and indexical distortions are starkly reversed in concert space: the recursive and site-specific original is “concertized,” or made linear; it is also aggressively amplified, mirroring the acoustical distortion of the original site through a battery of noisy guitar amps. And performers are staged at fantastic distances from each other that aim to model or “re-perform” the actual physics of resonance and reflection that produced much of the work’s signature distortion in its original site. More on Deathstar Orchestration below. 

 Link: Portikus.de