From festival catalogue: “Rosenfeld’s 2017 exhibition Deathstar at Portikus, Frankfurt, was premised on the reconstruction of a lost prototype from the 1990s: a multi-microphone nicknamed the “deathstar,” which was under development in the last days of the famed Bell Labs in NJ. Rosenfeld took up the deathstar's claim of experiential or subjective recording by constructing a facsimile of the original object and installing it in the gallery as a site of continuous recording and playback for the two-month duration of the exhibition. As fragments of noise, melody, speech and the ambient disruptions of passersby punctuated an overall silence, she amassed a large body of recorded traces within the work’s volatile and feedback-prone soundfield. These she subsequently transcribed back into notations, which were interpreted by pianist Marino Formenti near the close of the exhibition, and, later in 2017, at German music festival Donaueschingen Musiktager, in a fully orchestrated version (Deathstar Orchestration), by Ensemble Musikfabrik of Cologne with Formenti as piano soloist. Deathstar Orchestration, and its new version Deathstar (reduction), for Formenti with Yarn/Wire, both extend the installation’s temporal and indexical distortions into concert space. Where the original was continuous, looping, recursive and site-specific, the concertization is linear, ‘historicized’ (in the sense that it obeys the conventions of classical music), and answers to the excessive and contingent character of the deathstar’s original signal through an excess in staging: a wall-of-sound approach that requires instruments to be amplified through the distorting filter of guitar amps.”

“Rosenfeld’s second work, My body, a commission of Time:Spans festival, orients the actions of Yarn/Wire around a new suite of the composer’s dub plates, acetate-coated LPs that have been a longstanding material in her practice. Rosenfeld has a prolific history creating dub plates as a corollary to her compositional practice; as an archive, they track her larger works in fragmentary form since the late 1990s and have been the basis for both improvised music and additional composed works structured around the aesthetics of turntablism and musical collectivism. As objects, they represent a quasi-improvisational, quasi-compositional register of flux and action where their singularity and fragility— their tendency to decline rapidly in fidelity as they are played—and their responsiveness to acoustic conditions have manifested as signature affiliations to material instability and transformation.”

https://timespans.org/concert/yarn-wire-marino-formenti-marina-rosenfeld/