"For over two decades, New York-based artist and composer Marina Rosenfeld has pioneered a specific language for turntable music, based on an ever-expanding collection of dub plates she creates. The dubplate is a one-off, hand-cut record. Each dubplate can be made to contain any array of sounds decided on by its creator. For Rosenfeld, her discovery of the dubplate in the late 1990s was a pivotal moment, when she recognized the material instability of the medium as critical tool for performance and composition. On Index, the investigation of this materiality is paramount. The physical intimacy that colors the relation between the hand and the plate is revealed through a very particular reading of the turntable, one which sits in parallel to the more recognized ways in which that technology has been deployed as a performative tool. This edition features a series of live recordings and related materials that trace the development of Rosenfeld's tactile approach and her shifting collection of sound materials. The recordings are published alongside a book featuring extensive archival documentation, photography, and a longform conversation between Marina Rosenfeld and Lawrence English.
Marina Rosenfeld on the dub plates: "I don't care that much about the alchemy that some artists generate combining LPs, communicating with the ghosts of the past, that kind of thing. I love it when other people do it. In my own case, I'm really interested in the materiality of the plate, the tactile and hyper sensitive way sound is extracted from it, the signal to noise ratio and its condition of radical flux that you get with dub plates. What I'm doing there is adjacent to music-making, but I often think it might not be strictly speaking, about getting to the best sound, if that's what musicians are understood to be doing, by and large. My approach has something of carrying out exercises to it, to what end I'm not entirely sure, but on a personal level, I would say, some strange synthesis of formalism and kind of physical intimacy." - Room40 .
After nearly a decade of false starts, multiple game plans veering off the rails, and a handful of shattered hopes and/or dreams, the odyssey is finally complete—the new Fusetron site is here.
This is the first phase of a multipart rollout that will span the next few months: the currently browsable stock includes miscellaneous new releases from the past 8+ months (we have a lot of catching up to do), plus approximately a third of our backstock. Note that we’ve reduced/slashed prices on many titles and will continue to do so in order to make room for new stock. We’ll also be expanding / tweaking / improving / debugging the site itself (for example, we still have work to do on the automated international postage system, not to mention the inevitable inventory discrepancies that come with transferring an ancient and massive database to a new system).
Over the next few months, as we take inventory, clean house, and delve into our storage, we will be uploading thousands of additional items, gradually, on a near-daily basis. This will include the majority of the LPs, as well as many titles, in all formats, once thought long-gone. Many currently “sold out” items are likely to resurface.
Finally, once our general backstock is up (probably in the next two or three months) we’ll begin making our extensive stockpile of rarities available online for the first time: tons of random out-of-print titles, "deadstock," warehouse finds, secondhand collectibles, etc., accumulated over the past few decades.
Frequent/returning customers will be getting early access to these items. Details to follow on how this will work (a priority mailing list? a 'frequent flyer'-like program?), but it will not be based on dollars spent. We want to reward those who consistently support us, especially in the discogs marketplace era (to those who show up trying to poach five copies of a one-off rarity, and nothing else, ever… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ).
So—we suggest you take some time to dig through the site—even we’ve been surprised by what’s been turning up, and there’s much more to come.
