"Hard Love," part of composer Marina Rosenfeld's collaboration with Jamaican artist Warrior Queen
New York has MoMA PS1’s Warm Up summer series; Los Angeles has MOCA’s Step and Repeat fall counterpart. Tomorrow, Opening Ceremony will link up yet again with the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles for the second event in its monthlong series, showcasing a multidisciplinary variety show of live performances in Downtown LA. It’s a grassroots, somewhat helter-skelter initiative to bring both new-media and established artists together, and we’re excited to be a part of it (in a somewhat-official capacity), presenting the lineup of DJs including Dangel xxx, Psychopop, and Open1One.
New York-based composer Marina Rosenfeld is one of the artists performing tomorrow, and is known for her elaborate soundscapes and intricate installations. She hasn’t spent much time in LA since her days at CalArts in the early ‘90s, so the forthcoming performance will be a homecoming of sorts. For the occasion, Rosenfeld will get back to her roots with simply two turntables, a mixer, and roughly ten self-recorded dubplates that she calls her “sonic diaries.”
“In a funny way, I like to leave it to the last moment,” she said of the meticulous, emotional selection process behind her turntable sets. “It’s the opposite of this infinitude that we have to deal with in all of these other modalities, with all this digital storage where we can kind of draw on anything and everything. If you’re just going to bring ten dubplates somewhere, you’ve made a selection. I actually find that really nice... Especially onstage, it’s nice to get to that ‘oh fuck!’ moment where you only have two choices.”
So what sounds will resonate with Marina on Saturday night? Showgoers can anticipate music from her installation/performance piece PA, a sonic exploration of PA systems featuring a vocal collaboration with Jamaican artist Warrior Queen, and some orchestral music from a piece she worked on in Europe last year entitled Free Exercise. Orchestral doesn’t imply conventional or classical, though. As Marina told us, the eclectic piece has “a little sub-scene in it having to do with The Marx Brothers with a little bit of a sample from [the 1933 film] Duck Soup.” These clips will play alongside more abstract sounds culled from the artist’s personal recordings, which she lovingly described as “tones that I generated at one point and am always sort of tweaking.”
Rosenfeld maintains her “more personal” turntable work in addition to her self-described “high-falutin’ compositional practice, where I’m mounting large-scale pieces,” which can involve anything from using teenagers as vessels for performing deconstructed modernist classical