**Glass mastered CD • 6-panel digisleeve (coated 350gms cardboard)** Operating between Italy in Japan, since its founding in 2018, 901 Editions has carved a singular path through the landscape of experimental sound. Like its predecessor, Farmacia901, the label is founded around principles of minimal beauty, music as design, and sound as malleable material, issuing stunning works by Akio Suzuki, Steve Roden, Minamo, Yann Novak, Giovanni Di Domenico, Asmus Tietchens, and numerous others. Their latest, Leaving, an incredible body of recordings by the duo of Ben Vida and Marina Rosenfeld, raises this already high bar. Issued as a beautiful, glass-mastered CD in a 6-panel digi-sleeve, with an 8-page booklet exploring and documenting the project, the album’s visionary expanses of ambience and pointillistic texture, stand as a high-water mark from two of the most exciting artists working today.

Ben Vida and Marina Rosenfeld have both been active members of the American experimental music scenes for more than two decades, slowly ascending as two of the most noteworthy voices within the contemporary field. Vida first emerged in Chicago as a member of the legendary ensemble, Town and Country, with Jim Dorling, Joshua Abrams, and Liz Payne, before moving to New York and venturing into the out reaches of conceptual sound as a solo composer, while Rosenfeld, also based in New York, has assembled a meticulous body of work across the realms of music, sound art, and the visual realm across roughly the same period.

Leaving is the duo’s third outing, building on the ground covered by 2018's Feel Anything and 2020’s Vertice. The album draws on material conceived for a remote performance that was staged during the summer of 2020, at the height of New York’s Covid-19 quarantine, within the empty volume Fridman Gallery. An unbroken sonorous expanse of startling scope, deep rolling ambiences, penetrated by rumbling harmonics, and delicate punctuations of texture and tonality, rise as a conceptual meditation on absence and presence, the fragmentation and drift of the contemporary reality aggregated by the pandemic, and very meaning of sound within a framework that bridges sound art, musical composition, and the context of fine art.

Startling in scope and imagism, the sheer force and masterful artistry of Leaving is truly overwhelming, and beautiful beyond words. Yet another towering achievement to have merged from the hands of 901 Editions, and arguably Vida and Rosenfeld greatest accomplishment as a duo yet.



‘Leaving’ is a generative four-loudspeaker composition created for Skaņu 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’)” - Label press release