Ben Vida + Marina Rosenfeld – Leaving

ben-vida-marina-rosenfeld-leaving

CD + booklet – 901 Editions

Leaving is the third collaboration between New York-based artists Ben Vida and Marina Rosenfeld, following on from Feel Anything (iDEAL Recordings) and Vertice (Fridman Gallery). This time the duo has conceived a generative four-loudspeaker composition for the annual Skaņu Mežs festival in Riga, Latvia. Skaņu Mežs has helped to increase the already interesting catalogue of 901 Editions, the Italian label run by Fabio Perletta. 901 Editions focuses on the hybridization of experimental music with contemporary art, providing a perfect partner for the generative poetics and creativity of the two New Yorkers. Leaving is a meditation on absence and presence, and the fragmentation and drift of our present reality – a reflection born in New York City during the hot summer of the Covid-19 lockdown. It is permeated by improvised, electroacoustic musical elaborations informed by the duo’s shared memories. Complexity can be found in its dense and hypnotic tonal movements. These movements, which include gasps, drones, rustling and other inscrutable audio elements, demand our attention. Viva and Rosenfeld incorporate improvisation into a structure that uses four loudspeakers as a conceptual foundation. Although Leaving feels melancholic and estranged, its sequences are jarring and focus the mind with their obvious tension, while alien melodies invoke dreamscapes and a sort of retro-future exoticism. The packaging of the release shares the same beauty and power of the sounds. The glass-mastered CD comes in a 6-panel digi-sleeve and is accompanied by an 8-page booklet with texts by Evan Calder Williams. The elements performed within this project follow a continuous evolution and vocabulary. This can be traced back through previous performances, installations and experimental practices from the two artists, culminating in this abstract sound conversation that is both imaginative and inspired.

 

Ben Vida + Marina Rosenfeld – Leaving