Jessie Marino is a Berlin-based violinist, vocalist, and electronics player, composer, and media artist. Her compositions and performances abstract ideas drawn from all stripes of popular culture and political discourse, girded by a definitively humanistic sensibility rife with equal doses of wit and pathos.
Marino’s Murder Ballad project addresses a small subset of the American country-folk music tradition whose lyrics describe the details of real-life violence. These ballads originated in England and Scotland in the 18th century, but the American Murder Ballads developed their own method of storytelling, focusing on real events and using the song format as a performative tabloid, depicting in gruesome detail the methods and outcomes of authentic murderous acts. Marino’s first volume of Murder Ballads featured the American string Aperture Duo and premiered in 2023.
The second volume of Murder Ballads, The Positive Reinforcement Campaign, was commissioned by Donaueschingen Musik Tage and is the first recorded one from this ongoing project. It features the Norwegian experimental percussion trio Pinquins (Sigrun Rogstad Gomnæs, Ane Marthe Sørlien Holen & Jennifer Torrence), and contemporary music double bass bass player and composer Inga Margrete Aas, all adding vocals. These musicians are known for their genre-defying musical visions. Guests vocalist Emilia Dorr, trombonist Weston Olencki, and guitarist Wendy Eisenberg further expand the Ensemble’s rich sonic palette.
Marino uses the language of Anglo-American folk music traditions to witness and retell our current reality through a feminist lens, reflecting on the horrific stories of our current time. The new ensemble introduces into the traditional Appalachian folk ballads and traditional Sacred Harp hymns modern-day free improvisation strategies, experimental bowing and percussive techniques, and group singing. The six dramatic ballads are liberated from the constraints of the traditional folk songs, reimagined, reconfigured, and extended as thought-provoking, intense, but compassionate feminist cries or powerful, deeply emotional, and intimate sacred rituals attempting to exorcise the brutality of contempt, greed, jealousy, and utter disregard.
This performative display of female solidarity gives women control of the narratives that once incited a detached view of the violence they experienced, aiming to reconstruct these ballads to embolden women to enact their rightful autonomy. Still, Marino recommends taking care while listening as these ballads chronicle horrific stories of physical violence.
Eyal Hareuveni
Jessie Marino (fiddle, voice, electronics), Inga Margrete Aas (double bass, voice), Sigrun Rogstad Gomnæs (percussion, voice), Ane Marthe Sørlien Holen (percussion, synthesizer, voice), Jennifer Torrence (percussion, voice), Emilia Dorr (voice), Weston Olencki (trombone), Wendy Eisenberg (guitar)
