BEN VIDA (US)
MARINA ROSENFELD (US)
LEAVING
32’41”
FORMAT: CD + 8PP BOOKLET + DIGITAL
CAT. N.: 9ED021
EDITION: 300
RELEASE DATE: 10 AUGUST, 2021
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ARTWORK BY AMY PLEASANT
TEXT (BOOKLET) BY EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS
DESIGN BY MOTE STUDIO
RECORDED IN 2020
ALL MUSIC: BIRD SHOW (ASCAP) AND FILIFORM MUSIC (ASCAP)
‘Leaving’ is a generative four-loudspeaker composition created for Skanu Mežs by Marina Rosenfeld and Ben Vida, who perform as a duo and have recorded two albums in recent years, ‘Feel Anything’ and ‘Vertice’. Drawing from both records as well as a remote performance that was filtered through the empty volume of New York’s Fridman Gallery during the hot summer of the city’s Covid-19 quarantine, ‘Leaving’ is the artists’ meditation on the absence and presence, fragmentation and drift of our present reality — “a strange dialogue, dreaming of each other through communication of another order… (François Bonnet on ‘Vertice’)”
Ben Vida is a composer, improviser and artist. In the mid-1990s he co-founded the minimalist quartet Town & Country and released records under the moniker Bird Show. As a solo artist and in collaboration he has worked with numerous labels including PAN, iDEAL, Shelter Press and Kranky.
Vida's interests in sound synthesis, acoustic phenomena, conceptual writing and expanded compositional forms has led to works produced across mediums and settings, including compositions for choir, percussion ensembles, video, musique concrete, solo acoustic guitar, live electronics and more.
His projects have been presented widely in venues such as the Guggenheim, NYC; Centro Pecci, Prato; STUK, Leuven; the MCA, Chicago; The ICA, London; The Kitchen, NYC; Performa Biennial, NYC; EMPAC, Troy, NY; Berghain, Berlin; Cricoteka Museum, Kraków; the Sydney Opera House; Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna; Borderline Festival, Athens; the Royal Festival Hall, London; INA/GRM, Paris and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY.
Vida’s work has been featured in Artforum, The Quietus, Modern Painters, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Art Review, Wire Magazine, The Creators Project, WIRED Magazine among others.
Recent projects include a collaboration with YarnWire and vocalist Nina Dante premiered through Lampo at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago and the four hour electronics piece Reducing the Tempo to Zero released on Shelter Press.
Vida teaches at Brooklyn College in the Sonic Arts MFA.
Marina Rosenfeld is an artist and composer who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been widely exhibited and performed in contexts spanning the visual arts and contemporary music. Recent and ongoing projects include the solo exhibition “We’ll start a fire,” at Kunsthaus Baselland, in Basel, Switzerland (through September 2021) and the exhibitions “Seeing Sound," at Kadist Foundation, San Francisco, and “Hôtel de Lièvre,” at Campoli Presti Gallery, Paris, both also 2021. During 2020 she created Ssalute as part of the Aurora Biennial in Dallas, Texas, an installation-performance in a vacant parking structure featuring virtuoso trumpeter Raquel Samayoa, and released Deathstar (Shelter Press), a double album documenting a multiyear project that traced the sounds of her exhibition at Portikus Kunsthall, Frankfurt (“Deathstar,” 2017), through solo piano, orchestral and chamber versions, featuring Marino Formenti, Ensemble MusikFabrik and Yarn/Wire Ensemble.
Rosenfeld’s work has been commissioned and presented by the Park Avenue Amory; the Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney, Montreal, PERFORMA and Liverpool biennials; Fondacion Serralves, Porto; South London Gallery; “Every Time A Ear di Soun,” for documenta14; the Haus der Kulturen Der Welt in Berlin; in coproductions between the Holland Festival and Stedelijk Museum, Kunsthall Bergen and Borealis Festival, and many others. Rosenfeld has created scores for choreographers Ralph Lemon and Maria Hassabi, and performed live improvised music with Merce Cunningham Dance Company between 2004-2008. She began her career as an experimental turntablist and continues to create improvised music using mainly original dub plates.