Marina Rosenfeld is a composer and turntablist based in New York City. She initiated a decade-long engagement with composition, improvisation, performance and situational aesthetic practices while still a student in 1994 with her now-notorious “sheer frost orchestra”, a performance realized by 17 women on floor-bound electric guitars, deploying nail-polish bottles as sensitive and magical sound-producing implements. Later “orchestras”, including the performances “emotional orchestra” (Deitch Projects, New York, ’03, Tate Modern, London, ‘05), and “WHITE LINES” (Wien Modern festival ‘05, British School at Rome, Taktlos Bern, ‘06, Weld/Stockholm ‘07), have continued to evolve around the ideas first considered in this series of works, especially the concept of deploying untrained musicians in the context of improvised music, and the larger question of the ideosocial construction of music-making itself.

As a turntablist, Marina has developed a distinctive practice playing her own custom acetate records (‘dub plates’), which are imprinted with original, fragmentary sound created in the studio to be remixed, manipulated, and otherwise transformed live. She performs frequently in the U.S. and Europe, and has performed with many leading contemporary musicians, including Ikue Mori, Christian Marclay, Tony Conrad, Kaffe Matthews, George Lewis, Nels Cline, Lee Ranaldo, Martin Tétreault, Otomo Yoshihide, Philip Jeck, Kim Gordon, Christof Kurzmann, Alan Licht, Elliot Sharp, Dieb 13, Raz Mesinai, Anthony Coleman, and many others. She’s also brought her unique sensibility to sound installations for speaker arrays of various sizes and formats, and music composition-related forays into video and photography, especially lenticular or 3D photography in constellations of turntables, photos and original LPs (“fragment opera”).

Marina’s work has appeared in a wide variety of contexts including the Whitney Museum (and the ’02 Whitney Biennial), the Tate Modern Museum, Artists Space, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; a public-art project for Creative Time; galleries including Curt Marcus, Greene Naftali, Rosamund Felsen, Deitch Projects; and festivals in the US and abroad including Donaueschingen, Ars Electronica, Musikprotokoll/Steirische Herbst, Pro Musica Nova, Maerz Musik, Mutek, Wein Modern and The Wire's Adventures in Modern Music, among others.

She’s performed live with Merce Cunningham Dance Company; with the art-band “Text of Light”; with Sonic Youth during their “Good-bye Twentieth Century” tour; and was part of the London Musicians Collectives’ “Turntable Hell” project.

She’s been included in numerous surveys of digital culture / sound-art / experimental music including “Bitstreams” (Whitney Museum), “Her Noise” (Electra), “Music / Video” (Bronx Museum & Strassbourg Musee d’Art Moderne et Contemporain), “Electronic Music Archive” (Kunsthalle St. Gallen), and “New Sounds New York” (The Kitchen). Commissioned works include "bone canopy/tine palace" for The Kitchen House Blend Ensemble; "Cephissus landscape", a 16-channel public installation for the reopening of New York’s Winter Garden n September 2002 (with works by Laurie Anderson, David Byrne and Ben Rubin); “Delusional Situation” for the 2002 Whitney Biennial; and “anti-Warhol movement” for New York's Diapason Gallery for Sound and Intermedia. 

Marina’s solo releases are: 

theforestthegardenthesea: music from fragment opera (1999, Charhizma / Vienna), featuring Alan Licht, David Galbraith and others; co-produced by Mayo Thompson (Red Krayola) 

the sheer frost orchestra: hop, drop, drone, slide, scratch and A for anything (2001, Charhizma / Vienna), featuring Ikue Mori, Barbara Ess, Kaffe Matthews, Chiara Giovando, and many others 

joy of fear (2006, Softl/Cologne), with cellist Okkyung Lee 

Other recording projects include “DJTrio” with Christian Marclay and Toshio Kajiawara (Asphodel, San Francisco); and “a water’s wake,” with drummer Tim Barnes and Toshio Kajiwara (Quakebasket, NY).

Performers in Marina’s “sheer frost” and “emotional” orchestras have been too numerous to list, but include Laurie Anderson, Kembra Pfahler (aka 'Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black'), Kaffe Matthews, o.blaat, Okkyung Lee, Chiara Giovando, 'Honeychild', Jutta Koether, Josephine Meckseper, Jacqueline Humphries, Jennifer Baron, and many others.  

Marina’s writing has appeared in Artforum, Leonardo and the LA Weekly and will next appear in John Zorn’s forthcoming “Arcana 2: Musicians on Music.” She’s been a member of the faculty of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College since 2003.