Marina Rosenfeld - PA/Hard Love (Room40, 2013)
A collaboration you never expected. Warrior Queen leaves her familiar dancehall territory at the request of New York conceptual sound artist Marina Rosenfeld. In her wake her deadpan rhymes and ragga rhythms that create a new world through background noise. Marina Rosenfeld built a giant P.A. system consisting of large resonating and sound-absorbing speakers in 2009. Using these, she translates ambient sound into its abstract forms resulting in crackling electronic disturbances, scraping metal, languishing drones and sudden eruptions. On “P.A./Hard Love”, the album, Rosenfeld not only adds Warrior Queen’s voice, but the playing of cellist Okkyung Lee is also stretched and crumbled into new sounds where melody ceases to follow a logic. It’s a bizarre fusion of different musical worlds that slowly intrigues and hypnotizes the listener. ‘P.A./Hard Love’ is surreal future music. Elusive and otherworldly. Uplifting and psychedelic. Opening track ‘New York/It’s All About…’ is an amalgam of city sounds suggesting an idea of overcrowding and congested streets with bleeps and meandering synths. Out of nowhere, Warrior Queen emerges, teasing you with a children’s tune. In huge contrast to the “Hard Love” she calls for a few minutes later. In between, Rosenfeld plays with ambient elements, sudden pulses and rhythms. As if eternally turning the AM tape, she conjures up sounds that seem to come from nowhere, but sound like suddenly reverberating apparitions. It’s a complex record that clumsily vies for your attention but in return drags you further into an unknown world, time after time, where the surroundings are just sound and everything around you is breathing and moving.
Released on Room40,