::SPATIAL 013 :: Yo Vinyl Richie | Axine M | Zarasara

Sunday, December 14, 2025
169 Bowery NYC
8:00 PM

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.

About the Artists

Axine M is Brooklyn-based vocalist and music artist Maxine de las Pozas, whose mission is to embed unpredictability and flexibility into her sonic practice. The Ancient Greek term Axenos, or “inhospitable place,” refers to the Black Sea before nautical technology had advanced enough to safely traverse it. Axine is a vessel for musical inquiries and creative impulses spanning multiple genres and sentiments, carving out a space for itself against the grain of the dystopian imaginary.

Her 2025 experimental techno EP with anno records, Bored Giant Engine Sputter, is a digital construction of uncanny organicism. A trained vocalist and seasoned singer/songwriter, Maxine incorporates vocals, fretless guitar, and conventional song structure in free-form electro-acoustic live sets. Her performances are underpinned by her improvisational chops and custom, interactive Max4Live devices.

Maxine was a 2024 Issue Project Room Artist in Residence, where she created a multichannel audiovisual performance based on the story of Adriana Caselotti, the voice of Snow White. In 2024, she composed arrangements of original songs for a chamber music ensemble that premiered at Artists Space. In addition, she developed a live film score with Elliott Sharp. She has since collaborated with Amelia Heintzelmann and Clara Kim on a movement piece for the release of Bored Giant Engine Sputter, created a soundtrack for choreographer/dancer Maxi Hawkeye Canion, and started a band with Julia Santoli.

She works as a freelance Sound Engineer and is a Technical Co-Director of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.

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Yo Vinyl Richie, born in the Bronx and currently living in New York City, is a composer and turntablist whose passion for the turntable began at an early age. Inspired by DJ competitions and parties as a child, he honed turntablism techniques and embraced the turntable as his primary instrument, both solo and in collaboration with others. Richie has showcased his artistry at esteemed venues such as Roulette, The Kitchen, Princeton University, and Queens Town Hall. He is currently a Harvestworks TIP resident and also the an recipient of the NYSCA 2025 grant as a composer.

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Zarasara is a Indo-Japanese duo composed of Avanti Singh and Takumi Sugai, whose art practice centers on meditative sonic rituals derived from ancient Hindu, Buddhist and Japanese philosophies. The duo explores the movement of electro-acoustic live sound through space using minimalism, ambience and traditional Indian and Japanese instruments. Our name, derived from onomatopoeic expressions in both languages, captures the texture and rhythm of natural sounds — zara-zara (ज़रा ज़रा, little/granular in Hindi) and sara-sara (さらさら, soft/rustling in Japanese).