Greatest Hits

Since the early 1990’s, Marina Rosenfeld has produced a substantial archive of acetate test-pressing records, or dubplates, which track across her practice— forming the basis for both improvised music, installations, and scores structured by the politics and aesthetics of turntablism and the material distortions of mechanical sound reproduction. Rosenfeld’s works thread into each other and unfold gradually in various musical forms and sites through their reproduction and interpretation
GREATEST HITS is a project expressly about performing an archive and begins in 2015 at Carnegie Mellon University. Over the course of a three month exhibition, Rosenfeld generated a daily schedule of plays of her entire collection of dubplates, which she exhibited along the walls of a gallery. Written in such a way as to be legible to both SuperCollider and human readers, an accompanying playlist was read daily by people tasked with playing the dubplates and by a computer tasked with anticipating, recording and logging these plays in a software environment. Each full entry in the playlist had three elements listed after the name of the plate (a date // a side (a or b) // and a time of day) separated, in the notation, by double front-slashes //. (An excerpt of the notation and instructions can be found on the printed inner sleeve of the LP)
The following year, this playlist served as the score for GREATEST HITS: a reproduction, which premiered as a duo between Rosenfeld and percussionist Greg Fox in the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and again in 2019 at MoMA PS1 accompanied by Fox and percussionist Eli Keszler — the live recordings of which serve as the primary materials of this LP and the album cover is a photograph from this concert. Rosenfeld translated the listed date, side, and time of the playlist notation into explicit directions for Fox and Keszler to repeat, pause, introduce dynamics into, or simultaneously integrate aspects of the score. The players’ percussive movements are directed to feature “spirals” – circular patterns from high to low frequencies; “slopes” – oscillating patterns at high to low velocities; “vectors” – expanding or contracting patterns rolls, double rolls and hits; and, “lines” – fluid or stochastic patterns wavering in frequency across a line drawn on a surface