Yo Vinyl Richie :: “I Love my Job - Busy Restaurant” is a 40-minute turntable performance that immerses the audience in the sonic atmosphere of a high-end New York City restaurant during peak dinner hours. Set within a curated section of a bustling, upscale dining space, this octophonic audio experience reimagines the environment through a turntablist’s lens. Using turntables and specially pressed vinyl records, the performance transforms everyday restaurant sounds into a living soundscape—blending ambient noise, fragmented conversations, and curated musical interludes into a layered narrative.

At the heart of the work is the juxtaposition between the sonic chaos of the restaurant and the internal world of the server navigating the space. Conversations about international politics, celebrity gossip, and personal finance become source material. These dialogues, once mundane, are sampled and reframed as compositional elements that drift in and out of focus, mimicking how a server might hear them while weaving through the tables. The performance will rely on vinyl records created specifically for this piece, featuring recorded conversations, ambient recordings, and manipulated textures. Through turntablism techniques such as beat juggling, scratching, layering, and rhythmic cueing, these elements will be reconstructed live to emulate the architecture and emotional climate of the restaurant. Directional mixing and cue placement will play a crucial role in creating a sense of spatial immersion and storytelling.

“I Love my job - Busy Restaurant” invites listeners to reflect on the dynamics of power, labor, and listening in public and private spaces. It honors the invisible labor that sustains New York’s luxury and service economy, while offering a surreal and fragmented mirror of a familiar social setting. The result is a hybrid experience—part musique concrète, part social commentary, and fully grounded in the expressive potential of turntables as instruments.

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Axine M :: Adriana Caselotti is the initially uncredited yet ubiquitous voice of Snow White, whose life was forever changed by her involvement in the watershed, first-ever feature-length animated film. 

Her family was largely comprised of professional opera singers and voice teachers, including her sister, who tutored the legendary opera singer Maria Callas. Caselotti was not informed of the scale of the project when she was hired. She was not invited to the premiere, and her career after the film was stifled by Disney’s influence on the industry; he wanted her unique sound to remain iconically tied to the character of Snow White. Disney allegedly dissuaded people in Hollywood from hiring her.

Although Snow White and the Seven Dwarves premiered almost 100 years ago, Adriana’s story remains horrifically relevant. Voices continue to be stolen with impunity. There is little recourse for those whose vocal likenesses are appropriated except to sue, often against major corporations. Even then, the line between imitation and appropriation is thinly defined. A public figure can defend their persona from misuse, but by the time one becomes a public figure, they have essentially relinquished the power of self-definition. The 21st-century artist is constantly encouraged to sell their face, their vibe, their voice to the attention economy for the illusion of agency in the digital near-future.

Adriana lived the remainder of her life in the shadow of the character she inspired (even the design was based on her test footage). She was unable to secure any major roles following the film’s release. She visited schools dressed as Snow White and signed autographs for a living, married and divorced four times, and lived in Los Angeles in a house full of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves ephemera, with a wishing well in the front yard. 

Axine M’s Adriana’s Distribution is a sound poem about exploitation, feminized labor, infantilization, and the devaluation of intellectual property.

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Zarasara :: Samsara / Ensō is a meditative, immersive performance that explores the cyclical nature of existence through sound and visual ritual. Drawing inspiration from two interrelated cultural and spiritual concepts — Samsara, the Hindu and Buddhist belief in the eternal cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, and Ensō (円相), the Zen Buddhist symbol of the circle representing wholeness, imperfection, and enlightenment — the work becomes both a spiritual reflection and a sonic journey.