'My body' by Marina Rosenfeld published on 2020-12-08T00:34:43Z My Body was a commission of the 2019 Time:Spans festival and was premiered by Yarn/Wire ensemble with Marina Rosenfeld performing alongside them on turntables. Each movement is oriented around a different approach to a suite of custom dub plates that have been distributed to the ensemble. The plates house seven bands of pre-composed sound materials—mostly short vocal ‘utterances’ Rosenfeld made during 2019 at Nokia Bell Labs with a 1930s prototype Voder (an early electronic speech synthesizer)—and are the basis for a set of eight variations. Each variation is both a social and musical occasion, requiring a distinct, intensive mode of listening. Performers collaborate to track and respond to the dynamic outcomes of various techniques of playback on turntables together in real time, foregrounding and building outwards from the sociality of collective listening. The eighth variation sees the ensemble recreating the acoustic signature of the dub plate itself by rubbing small stones together in imitation of LP surface noise.