Arnold Dreyblatt's Nodal Excitation (1979) recorded live in September 2012 at a performance from Brooklyn's  ISSUE Project Room.

Arnold Dreyblatt’s notes on this solo work for his amplified "excited strings" acoustic bass:

"In the spring of 1979, I was approached to perform at a downtown performance festival in New York. I had been developing a repertoire of isolated percussive and bowed attacks, and these evolved into a continuous rhythmic technique in which I could excite chords of overtones above the fundamental."

"The performance considers the location and influence of the acoustic Nodal Regions as identified on #12 and #11 unwound music wire stretched on an acoustic double bass body (40.5" speaking length). The integrity of a fundamental vibration is maintained for both strings at all times; all movement of pitch occurs in the overtone structure. A shorter speaking length is never created through "stopping" or "fretting" techniques. Rather, harmonic, partial vibrations are calculated, coaxed, and are occasionally isolated at the nodes of the string."

Arnold Dreyblatt (born in New York City, 1953) is a composer, performer and visual artist. He studied music with Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, and Alvin Lucier and has been based in Berlin, Germany since 1984. Among the second generation of New York minimal composers, Dreyblatt developed a unique approach to composition and music performance. As he began his music in the late 1970's in New York, he invented a set of new and original instruments, performance techniques, and system of tuning and in addition has formed and led numerous ensembles under the title The Orchestra of Excited Strings. In 2007, he was elected to the German Academy of Art (Akademie der Künste, Berlin). He is currently Professor for Media Art at the Muthesius Academy of Art and Design in Kiel.

This podcast was produced in collaboration with the radio station of the Clocktower Gallery, operating at artonair.org

Arnold Dreyblatt, "Nodal Excitation" Live at ISSUE 9/2012

A pioneering force behind the evolution of minimalism, violinist and composer Tony Conrad’s performances employ a droning, mesmerizing performance idiom of long durations, amplification, and precise pitch to explore new worlds of sound. In this episode, Conrad performs live on solo violin in celebration of ISSUE Project Room's 10th anniversary, recorded live in July 2013.

Conrad returns to ISSUE Friday, October 18th 2013, performing solo on a bill that includes the lo-fi analog drones of LA multi-instrumentalist Lee Noble, and a collaborative performance by Damon McMahon aka Amen Dunes and visual artist Tom Thayer.

Polymath Tony Conrad is known by many names: composer, filmmaker, video artist, media activist, writer, and educator. Associated with the founding of minimal music and underground film, he is well known for his pivotal role in the formation of the Velvet Underground and as a co-founder The Dream Syndicate— who utilized intonation and sustained sound to produce what the group called "dream music", what we know now as drone. Conrad has composed more than a dozen audio works with special scales and tuning for solo amplified violin with amplified strings. Conrad has played and collaborated with Rhys Chatham, Charlemagne Palestine, Jennifer Walshe, Tony Oursler, Eli Keszler, and many others. In the early 1970s Conrad produced several series of works that severely stretched the limits of “film,” including his cooked and electrocuted films, and the “Yellow Movie” series, and "The Flicker" (1966), which is considered a key early work of the structural film movement. Conrad’s work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Documenta, Venice Biennale, Tate Modern, LA Museum of Contemporary Art, and many others. He exhibits at Greene Naftali Gallery in New York and Galerie Daniel Buchholz in Berlin and Cologne. Conrad’s early career is the subject of a study by Branden Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (Zone, 2008).

Tony Conrad solo at ISSUE, 7/2013

Legendary Michigan trio Wolf Eyes create harsh and hypnotic electronic landscapes, merging the frenzied energy of hardcore with the nihilistic menace of early industrial and noise. This full set was recorded as part of ISSUE Project Room's summer 2013 concert series at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

Constantly touring in the early 2000s, Wolf Eyes has forged a cult fan base and opened the hermetic world of the noise underground to a new generation of curious indie rockers, punks, and experimentalists. The band began as a solo project for noise veteran Nate Young, with Aaron Dilloway and John Olson. Dilloway left the band in 2005, and Mike Connolly of Hair Police has rounded out the trio since. The group is rumored to have released over 150 recordings in their relatively short lifespan, on labels such as Bulb Records, Troubleman Unlimited, Fusetron, and Sub Pop, as well as on Olson’s American Tapeslabel, Dilloway’s Hanson Records and, most recently, Mike Connelly’s Gods of Tundra label.

Originally broadcast at http://artonair.org/show/wolf-eyes

Wolf Eyes live, August 2013

Play That: Amiri Baraka & Henry Grimes - Live at ISSUE, 3/2009

Thursday, September 15th, at 8pm ET, 2022 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow Theodore Kerr presents AUDIO MEME, his second program in THE BODY POPULAR series. The program features multidisciplinary artist James T. Green performing a “live mix” of a conversation between sound culture luminaries Josh Gwynn and Leila Day. On July 27th, at 11:30am ET, an initial broadcast mix of the conversation will play on Montez Press Radio.

AUDIO MEME is a project that explores the power and intimacy of podcasts to impact progressive social change. Through the art of using one’s voice, broadcast, and listening, podcasts bring ideas, people, and feelings together, creating opportunity for personal reflection, mass education, and collective conversations.

This event unfolds in two parts. On September 15th, audience members are invited to attend the AUDIO MEME live event at The Garage. In this non-tradition state of the art performance space, multi-disciplinary artist James T. Green will perform a live mix of a conversation about voice, power and social change recorded between sound culture luminaries, Josh Gwynn and Leila Day. On July 27th, a broadcast mix of their conversation will play exclusively on Montez Press Radio Radio.

AUDIO MEME is curated by Theodore (ted) Kerr for ISSUE Project Room. AUDIO MEME is part of Theodore (ted) Kerr’s curatorial residency for ISSUE entitled THE BODY POPULAR, a curated series of gatherings and broadcasts, propelled by artists, podcasters, writers, and others in NYC across the U.S. invested in questions around power, community, knowledge, and consumption in the 21st century. “The Body Popular” riffs on the phrase, “The Body Politic,” a notion that groups of people together have power, and a voice.

THE BODY POPULAR: AUDIO MEME w/ James T. Green Josh Gwynn & Leila Day (Montez Press Radio Broadcast)

Yarn/Wire perform Tristan Perich's "Chalk" on October 26, 2013 as part of ISSUE Project Room's Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plane festival.  

Yarn/Wire perform Tristan Perich's "Chalk" - Live at ISSUE 10/2013

Recorded in October 2013, Australian guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Oren Ambarchi performs live at ISSUE Project Room, Brooklyn, as part of our anniversary festival "Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain".

Ambarchi will return to ISSUE on Tuesday April 2nd as part of Unsound Festival New York, presenting a live version of his chamber work “Knots” featuring percussionist Joe Talia and violist James Rushford leading the Sinfonietta Cracovia players.
http://issueprojectroom.org/event/unsound-ambarchi-evol

Oren Ambarchi live at ISSUE, 10/2013

ISSUE Project Room Distributed Objects:
Sabisha Friedberg with Peter Edwards, "The Hant Variance" (2xLP)

Coming January 2015 - http://issueprojectroom.org/distributed-objects

Sabisha Friedberg’s double LP The Hant Variance was recorded at EMPAC with Peter Edwards in a custom-tuned environment using advanced multi-channel recording techniques to capture a configuration of spatialized sound sources. Combining granular synthesis, analogue synthesizers, tone oscillators and field recordings, the composition is comprised of three movements. The low-end bass, which was recorded live with a subwoofer configuration that allowed for rapid directional shifts, serves as a sonic armature for the piece. Sustained pure tones shift minimally and the allocation of sound engenders a sense of aural disorientation. This landscape, with the premise of summoning a new phantom or haunted sonic space, exists in an interstitial, albeit present zone.

Born in Johannesburg South Africa, Sabisha Friedberg’s composition, performance and installation work draws on the phenomenological and phantasmagorical, exploring perceptual delineation of space through sound, and low-end experiential thresholds. She has performed and presented installations widely in Western and Eastern Europe, Russia, Japan, and the US, and recently received commissions through residencies at ISSUE Project Room, EMPAC, and The Clocktower Gallery. In 2013 she presented the solo exhibition “Levitation” at Audio Visual Arts. Friedberg received her MFA from Bard College following undergraduate studies at San Francisco Art Institute. Peter Edwards is an American artist and musician living in Holland, best known for his DIY experimental electronics website casperelectronics. His work has been presented internationally at venues including The MIT Media Lab, Transmediale, Dutch Electronic Arts Festival, New York Electronic Arts Festival, and Performa, among others.

Preview // Sabisha Friedberg with Peter Edwards: The Hant Variance (2xLP Distributed Objects)

ISSUE Project Room Distributed Objects:
Sergei Tcherepnin, "Quasar ⇔ Lanterns" (2xLP)

Coming January 2015 - http://issueprojectroom.org/distributed-objects

Sergei Tcherepnin’s "Quasar ⇔ Lanterns" was originally produced in 2009 as an 8-channel installation with Ei Arakawa at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. Remixed to stereo for this release, Tcherepnin’s trio of works combine analog synthesizer recordings and other instrumental sources with field recordings captured during the artists’ travels to Turkey and Georgia. Each piece introduces a separate facet of Tcherepnin’s compositional practice, respectively probing the boundaries between perception/hallucination, active/passive listening, and form/fiction. In the first piece, titled "Death (Quasar)," recordings of an acoustic bass played by Adam Linson function as “sound meteors,” creating fissures and tears as they rip through a stable yet shifting aural field. "Sky" follows with a series of clear and high ear tones, unfolding as a succession of subtle sonic events. The final piece "Horse" explores the rhythmic and textural qualities of recorded horse hooves moving across stone, assembling the sounds into a sonic fiction in which horses and their riders leave the earth via flying carpets (objects referenced in the original installation).

Sergei Tcherepnin is a Brooklyn-based artist and musician. His work constructs temporary architectural interventions that push phenomena of the sonorous towards the haptic through performance, composition, and installation, exploring the materiality of sound and its physical and psychological effects on the listener. Recent performances and installations have been held at the 2014 Whitney Biennial, the 30th Sao Paulo Biennial, Guggenheim Museum, Audio Visual Arts, Murray Guy, and ISSUE Project Room.



Preview // Sergei Tcherepnin: Quasar ⇔ Lanterns (2xLP Distributed Objects)

LP released by ISSUE Project Room's Distributed Objects imprint on September 18, 2015

Pre-order at http://issueprojectroom.org/distributed-objects/eliminated-artist

Known for his uncompromising tape and synthesizer work, Pete Swanson has pushed the limits of electronic music since the early 2000s. Since stepping down as half of formative underground duo Yellow Swans, he has subverted the genres of noise and electronic dance music as a solo artist. For Eliminated Artist, the third LP release from ISSUE Project Room’s Distributed Objects imprint, Swanson ventures into new territories with two works at the intersection of electronic and acoustic sound, created in collaboration with New York instrumental quartet Yarn/Wire. Combining electronics, tape loops, and modular synthesizer with Yarn/Wire’s unique ensemble of two pianists and two percussionists, both works were recorded live at ISSUE Project Room, initiated as part of the ensemble’s 2011 residency at the Brooklyn venue and presenting organization.

Preview - Yarn/Wire and Pete Swanson: Eliminated Artist (DO03 LP)

LP released by ISSUE Project Room's Distributed Objects imprint on September 18, 2015

Order at http://issueprojectroom.org/distributed-objects/thiefth

Originally released on CD in 2005 and out of print for a decade, Thiefth is the first of four collaborations between poet Susan Howe and musician David Grubbs. This first LP edition, a limited run of 100 copies, is accompanied by a special edition letterpress print produced by Grenfell Press. Howe and Grubbs were first brought together when the Fondation Cartier in Paris proposed a collaborative performance. Grubbs had been a dedicated reader of Howe’s for more than a decade, and the opportunity to work with Howe’s poetry and her voice immediately intrigued.  In late 2003, the two set about to create performance versions of “Thorow” and “Melville’s Marginalia,” the two of Howe’s longer poems that comprise Thiefth.

Preview - Susan Howe and David Grubbs: Theifth (DO04 LP)

Performance
Sunday, February 28, 2016

ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn

Cellist Okkyung Lee and trumpeter Amir ElSaffar are distinguished instrumentalists who have developed formidable reputations for their exploratory performance techniques and genre-blurring approach to musical styles. This acoustic performance at ISSUE’s 22 Boerum Place theater features Lee and ElSaffar each performing solo sets, and in their first collaborative duo.

Organized by Lawrence Kumpf.

Okkyung Lee, a New York-based artist and South Korea native, has created a body of work blurring genre boundaries through collaborations and compositions while pushing the limitation of contemporary cello performance techniques. Her music draws from noise and extended techniques, jazz, Western classical, and Korean traditional and popular music. Since moving to New York in 2000, She has released more than 20 albums including her latest solo record Ghil produced by Lasse Marhaug on Editions Mego/Ideologic Organ, and Noisy Love Songs (for George Dyer) on Tzadik. She has performed and recorded artists from wide ranging genres including Laurie Anderson, David Behrman, Mark Fell, Douglas Gordon, Jenny Hval, Vijay Iyer, Christian Marclay, Ikue Mori, Lawrence D “Butch” Morris, Marina Rosenfeld, Jim O’Rourke, Evan Parker, Wadada Leo Smith, C Spencer Yeh and John Zorn to name just a few. Okkyung was rewarded with prestigious Doris Duke Performing Artist Award in 2015, was an ISSUE Project Room Artist-In-Residence in 2011, and received a Foundation For Contemporary Arts Grant in 2010.

Okkyung Lee - Live at ISSUE / February 28th, 2016

Alexandra Drewchin (Eartheater) is a New York based musician, poet, and artist that seeks on a daily bases to upgrade her mental software and challenging pedantic linguistic systems to create new meanings for new feelings. In 2015, Alexandra, released two records, Metalepsis and RIP Chrysalis, that received wide critical acclaim for their experimentation with pop and classical paradigms. Performing live, her hyper composed pieces are polarized by improvisational destruction. As an observer, the visual and vicarious amplification of Drewchin’s process is experienced simultaneously in Eartheater’s physical body as she contorts and pushes tensions to the brink. She is also known for her work with Greg Fox in the project Guardian Alien.

Video: https://vimeo.com/182128294

Photo: Cameron Kelley

Eartheater - Live at Pioneer Works / July 30th, 2016

Performance
Saturday, September 10th, 2016

ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn

Leila Bordreuil opens her 2016 Residency with the premiere of Piece for Cello and Double Bass Ensemble at ISSUE’s 22 Boerum Theater. A new work, the piece overly amplifies all instruments in order to make corporal micro-gestures and hushed overtones audible to the human ear. Pitches and melodies are rare, as the basic sonic capabilities of the instruments dictate the musicality and structure of the piece.

The piece features Brandon Lopez, Sean Ali, and Zachary Rowden on double bass. The premiere is followed by a second improvisational set featuring Leila Bordreuil, Joanna Mattrey (viola) and Sean Ali (bass).

Leila Bordreuil is a Brooklyn-based cellist and composer from France. Her cello playing is often improvised, and focuses on the relationship between the human body and the inherent sonic qualities of her instrument. Essential to her musical aesthetic is the expression of humans’ neuro-somatic imperfections, which she chooses to magnify through extreme amplification of very quiet playing, revealing microscopic gestures that are otherwise inaudible to the human ear. Her composed works draw from a similar aesthetic but also focus on sound through space and the distortion that arises from spatially organized sound sources. Leila’s collaborative projects include duos with Michael Foster and Tamio Shiraishi, a trio with Sean Ali and Joanna Mattrey, and the no-wave band “Signal Break” with Austin Jullian (Sediment Club) and Evin Huguenin (Sects). She has performed at the Whitney Museum, The Kitchen, The Stone, MoMA PS1, Roulette, the Performa Biennale, Ftarri (Tokyo, JP), the Heresy Series for Women in Sound (Manila, PHL), and many basements across the U.S.

Established in 2006, ISSUE's annual Artist-in-Residence program provides emerging artists each with a year-long residency in 2016, offering access to rehearsal space and facilities, equipment, documentation, pr/marketing, curatorial and technical expertise to create new works, reach the next stage in their artistic development, and gain exposure to a broad public audience.

Leila Bordreuil: Piece for Cello and Double Bass Ensemble - Live at ISSUE / September 10th, 2016

Performance
Saturday, March 11th, 2017 

ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn

Saturday, March 11th, ISSUE presents two generations of artists working in the medium of computational music: pioneering computer musician and scholar Curtis Roads and composer, artist and curator Eric Frye performing work in 4-channel sound.

Curtis Roads’ contributions to electronic music and computer music composition are vast. Roads was Editor and Associate Editor of Computer Music Journal from 1978 to 2000, and cofounded the International Computer Music Association in 1979. In addition, he has written books and anthologies including Foundations of Computer Music, The Music Machine, the textbook The Computer Music Tutorial, and Microsound, which presents the techniques and aesthetics of composition with sound particles.

For his ISSUE debut, Roads performs Flicker Tone Pulse, a dynamic audiovisual experience of finely tuned electronic and cinematic pieces he has composed since 2009 with long-time collaborator and video artist Brian O'Reilly. Roads will be showing O’Reilly’s visuals as he cultivates his purely computer generated tonalities from the “…realm of microsound, [from] sound grains first predicted in the acoustical theories of the physicist Dennis Gabor and the polymath Iannis Xenakis.”

In addition, Eric Frye performs his erudite style of uncompromising, fractured electronics that at once recall the spattered tangle of Keith Fullerton Whitman's recent generations, the digital subversions of Jeff Witscher and the incisive chimerizations of Florian Hecker. Andrée Ehresmann, Professor Émérite at Université de Picardie Jules Verne, describes Frye's work as “challenging the perception of an auditor by the dissociations of the sonic environment, the heterogeneity of the successive motives, often separated by sharp fractures and repetitions with slight modifications of multifaceted sounds, recalling ‘real-world’ sounds, but with a variance.”

Eric Frye is a composer, artist, and curator. Exploring non-orientable sonic surfaces, Frye operates between the disciplinary boundaries of sound, philosophy, linguistics, and mathematics. His live performances and installations are focused towards a recalibrated layering of multi-channel diffusions. Simultaneously dissociative and palpable, Frye’s compositions activate an interplay between material and immaterial. His latest recording, On Small Differences in Sensation, which includes texts by Fernando Zalamea, Inigo Wilkins, Andrée Ehresmann and Mathias Béjean, was released by Copenhagen-based imprint, Cejero. His most recent curatorial endeavor, Exploring Compositional Epistemologies, a series of performances, lectures, and installations that took place at Midway Contemporary Art in Minneapolis was called "an erudite survey of the fusion of technology, composition and performance exploring the intersections of time, knowledge, self-hood and sonic space" by Mn Artists. In October 2016 Frye was artist in residence at EMS Elektronmusikstudion Stockholm. Currently, he is developing a multi-sensory performance with researcher Simone Niquille, in addition to preparing material for a solo exhibition and continuing his research at Orfield Laboratories Minneapolis. He has forthcoming releases on Anòmia, and Further Records.

Eric Frye - LIVE at ISSUE / March 11th, 2017

Performance
Friday, March 3rd, 2017

ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn

For her third and final performance as a 2016 Artist-In-Residence, Leila Bordreuil premieres “Void and Dismissal” -- a collaborative piece developed by Bordreuil and composer, guitarist and vocalist Austin Julian (Sediment Club, Sunk Heaven). Featuring Tamio Shiraishi (alto sax) and Julia Santoli (spatialized amplifiers), the piece combines music and performance art within an operatic structure using homemade instruments and creative amplification methods. Evolving out of Bordreuil and Julian’s long-standing performance history, “Void and Dismissal” operates as an interactive piece at the intersection of noise, rock and sound-art -- a realized installment of their jointly subversive, amplified tonality and caustic sensibilities.

An improvised duo set by Leila Bordreuil on amplified cello and acclaimed guitarist Bill Nace -- well known as one half of visceral avant-noise duo Body/Head -- opens the performance.

Leila Bordreuil is a Brooklyn-based cellist and composer from France. Her cello playing is often improvised, and focuses on the relationship between the human body and the inherent sonic qualities of her instrument. Essential to her musical aesthetic is the expression of humans’ neuro-somatic imperfections, which she chooses to magnify through extreme amplification of very quiet playing, revealing microscopic gestures that are otherwise inaudible to the human ear. Her composed works draw from a similar aesthetic but also focus on sound through space and the distortion that arises from spatially organized sound sources. Leila’s collaborative projects include duos with Michael Foster and Tamio Shiraishi, a trio with Sean Ali and Joanna Mattrey, and the no-wave band “Signal Break” with Austin Jullian (Sediment Club) and Evin Huguenin (Sects). She has performed at the Whitney Museum, The Kitchen, The Stone, MoMA PS1, Roulette, the Performa Biennale, Ftarri (Tokyo, JP), the Heresy Series for Women in Sound (Manila, PHL), and many basements across the U.S.

Leila Bordreuil & Bill Nace Duo - LIVE at ISSUE / March 3rd, 2017

Performance
Saturday, March 11th, 2017

ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn

Saturday, March 11th, ISSUE presents two generations of artists working in the medium of computational music: pioneering computer musician and scholar Curtis Roads and composer, artist and curator Eric Frye performing work in 4-channel sound.

Curtis Roads’ contributions to electronic music and computer music composition are vast. Roads was Editor and Associate Editor of Computer Music Journal from 1978 to 2000, and cofounded the International Computer Music Association in 1979. In addition, he has written books and anthologies including Foundations of Computer Music, The Music Machine, the textbook The Computer Music Tutorial, and Microsound, which presents the techniques and aesthetics of composition with sound particles.

For his ISSUE debut, Roads performs Flicker Tone Pulse, a dynamic audiovisual experience of finely tuned electronic and cinematic pieces he has composed since 2009 with long-time collaborator and video artist Brian O'Reilly. Roads will be showing O’Reilly’s visuals as he cultivates his purely computer generated tonalities from the “…realm of microsound, [from] sound grains first predicted in the acoustical theories of the physicist Dennis Gabor and the polymath Iannis Xenakis.”

Curtis Roads creates, teaches, and pursues research in the interdisciplinary territory spanning music and sound technology. He studied electronic music and computer music composition at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and received a Doctorate from the Université Paris 8. He was Editor and Associate Editor of Computer Music Journal (The MIT Press) from 1978 to 2000, and cofounded the International Computer Music Association (ICMA) in 1979. A researcher in computer music at MIT (1980-1986), he also worked in the software industry for a decade. He taught electronic music composition at Harvard University and sound synthesis techniques at the University of Naples. He was appointed Director of Pedagogy at Les Ateliers UPIC (later CCMIX) and Lecturer in the Music Department of the Université Paris 8. Among his books are the anthologies Foundations of Computer Music (1985, The MIT Press) and The Music Machine (1989, The MIT Press). His textbook The Computer Music Tutorial (1996, The MIT Press) is widely adopted as a standard classroom text and has been published in French (1999, second edition 2007), Japanese (2001), and Chinese (forthcoming) editions. He edited the anthology Musical Signal Processing in 1997. His book, Microsound (2001, The MIT Press) presents the techniques and aesthetics of composition with sound particles.

Curtis Roads - LIVE at ISSUE / March 11th, 2017

Performance
Thursday, September 8th, 2016

ISSUE Project Room
Presenting at First Unitarian Congregational Society

ISSUE Project Room's Fall 2016 season opens at the First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn Heights with Oren Ambarchi in solo performance, and a duo set by Zeena Parkins & Brian Chase.

Known for his deft and exploratory instrumental approaches, Oren Ambarchi has been a central driver of extended sonic investigation in innumerable ensembles and productions with Fennesz, Charlemagne Palestine, Sunn 0)), Thomas Brinkmann, Keiji Haino, Alvin Lucier, John Zorn, Merzbow, Jim O'Rourke, Crys Cole and more. This evening Ambarchi appears solo, showcasing his highly refined sonic work ethic that is at once nuanced and cerebral -- sonically sublime and intelligently constructed.

Oren Ambarchi's works are hesitant and tense extended songforms located in the cracks between several schools: modern electronics and processing; laminal improvisation and minimalism; hushed, pensive songwriting; the deceptive simplicity and temporal suspensions of composers such as Morton Feldman and Alvin Lucier; and the physicality of rock music, slowed down and stripped back to its bare bones, abstracted and replaced with pure signal. From the late 90's his experiments in guitar abstraction and extended technique have led to a more personal and unique sound-world incorporating a broader palette of instruments and sensibilities. On releases such as Grapes From The Estate and In The Pendulum's Embrace Ambarchi employed glass harmonica, strings, bells, piano, drums and percussion, creating fragile textures as light as air which tenuously coexist with the deep, wall-shaking bass tones derived from his guitar.

Ambarchi has performed and recorded with a diverse array of artists such as Fennesz, Charlemagne Palestine, Sunn 0)), Thomas Brinkmann, Keiji Haino, Alvin Lucier, John Zorn, Merzbow, Jim O'Rourke, Keith Rowe, Akio Suzuki, Phill Niblock, John Tilbury, Richard Pinhas, Evan Parker, crys cole, Fire! and many more. Since 2001 Ambarchi has toured Europe, North America and Japan regularly and has performed at major festivals such as ATP (UK), Sonar (Spain), Mutek (Canada), CTM (Germany), INA GRM (France), Roskilde (Denmark), Etna Fest (Italy), Festival De Mexico (Mexico) and many more including a recent live collaboration with the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra at the Tectonics festival in Reykjavik. His acclaimed trio with Keiji Haino and Jim O'Rourke performs in Tokyo annually with many of their concerts documented on Ambarchi's Black Truffle label. Ambarchi has released numerous recordings for labels such as Touch, Southern Lord, Editions Mego, Drag City, Kranky and Tzadik. His latest release, Quixotism was listed in The Wire magazine's top 50 releases of 2014.

Oren Ambarchi - LIVE at First Unitarian Congregational Society / September 8th, 2016

Performance
Friday, April 7th, 2017

ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn

On Friday, April 7th, ISSUE gathers a group of artists who all shared a friendship with Tony Conrad, and a deep devotion to his music and art. In honor of Tony, who passed away on April 9th, 2016, Spectral Density is an evening of music and expression that sees original works by Henry Flynt, Dan Conrad, and Arnold Dreyblatt, as well as a performance of Tony’s Three Loops for Performers and Tape Recorders (1961) by Lary 7. The evening is curated by Tony’s close friend and 2010 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence MV Carbon.

Longtime ISSUE Project Room friend, collaborator and Board Member Tony Conrad (1940 – 2016) was a true polymath: composer, filmmaker, video artist, media activist, philosopher, writer, and educator. Amongst his countless contributions to experimental culture, Tony was associated with the founding of minimal music and underground film -- well known for drafting post-Cagean music compositions and text pieces, video works such his his 1966 film masterwork The Flicker, and collaborations with artists such as Henry Flynt, Jack Smith, Faust, and—as part of legendary drone ensemble Theatre of Eternal Music—La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, and John Cale. He performed and exhibited extensively, influenced countless artists, and was loved widely -- a profound and inspiring creative legacy. Tony was also a founding member of the ISSUE Project Room Board and a fundamental part of the ISSUE family.

This event is part of a series planned by Greene Naftali with friends, family, curators, and collaborators of Tony, including concerts and screenings at venues such as The Kitchen, Anthology Film Archives, Knockdown Center and ISSUE Project Room. The series centers around a memorial the afternoon of Saturday, April 8th, at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center. The memorial will feature speeches, videos, and musical performances from artists and writers that were close to Tony. For more information, please see: http://tonyconrad.memorial/

Henry Flynt is a philosopher, musician, and exhibited artist. He was born in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1940. At the age of 17, he was accepted into Harvard where he studied mathematics and became close friends with Tony Conrad. Henry became interested in composing “serious modern music” at that time and concluded that academics had little to offer him intellectually. He dropped out of school to devote his time to creative endeavors. He has created a genre he calls New American Ethnic Music which combines sounds from the South with an avant-garde influence. Henry was an active part of the post-Cage milieu in the 1960s and realized the term “concept art.” He is known for his political and artistic expressions in the 60s. He picketed two museums and Lincoln Center with Tony Conrad and Jack Smith. Flynt sat in for violist John Cale for a handful of Velvet Underground concerts in 1966. He studied with Hindustani singer Pandit Pran Nath, the mentor of La Monte Young and Terry Riley. Flynt graduated from NYU in 1970, then entered the New School as a graduate student in economics. Flynt’s work is interwoven with the study of mathematics, philosophy, spirituality, politics and economics. Flynt has releases dating back to 1963, Acoustic Hillbilly Jive. Archival recordings were released in the early 2000s on labels Ampersand, Locust, and Recorded. Flynt has infrequently performed in public.

Henry Flynt: Solo Electric Boogie (1979/2017) - LIVE at ISSUE / April 7th, 2017

Performance
Friday, October 20th, 2017

ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn

Friday, October 20th, ISSUE presents a public performance celebrating the work of pioneering French composer Éliane Radigue (in absentia), presented as a part of The Austrian Cultural Forum’s Moving Sounds Festival. Following her honoring at ISSUE’s 2017 Gala, the evening spans her acoustic and electronic compositions and features the world premiere of OCCAM RIVER XVI, performed by composer and clarinetist Carol Robinson and harpist Rhodri Davies, as well as a performance of Radigue’s 2013 piece OCCAM IX by Laetitia Sonami.

The evening also showcases Mila's Song in the Rain from The Songs of Milarepa, a tribute to the Tibetan saint and poet from the eleventh century. Released in 1983 and compiled in 2001 by Mimi Johnson’s Lovely Music, the song cycle is arguably considered the masterpiece of Radigue’s early electronic works. The recording of Mila's Song in the Rain is presented as a focused listening environment, demonstrating the signature organic mysticism of Radigue’s Arp synthesizer work alongside Lama Kunga Rinpoche and Robert Ashley’s respective Tibetan and English readings.

After completing her ground-breaking Naldjorlak trio for two basset horns and cello, Éliane Radigue began a new musical project called OCCAM OCEAN. She initiated the cycle with a solo harp piece written for Rhodri Davies in 2011. Little by little, solos for a wide range of instruments were created, including three for electronic instruments, and then combined into various chamber groupings. The combinations are seemingly infinite, a compositional coincidence that was extremely motivating to Radigue. Her first trio, OCCAM DELTA II, was written for bass clarinet, viola and harp, and premiered by Carol Robinson, Julia Eckhardt and Davies in 2012. It, and other pieces for these performers, will soon be released by shiiin on a double CD.

OCCAM IX, the ninth composition in the OCCAM OCEAN composition cycle, was created with Laetitia Sonami on electronics with her new instrument, the Spring Spyre. Sonami originally studied with Radigue in France in 1976. While her music took on a very different expression through her design of unique controllers and live performance, they both remained very close. In 2011, Sonami requested Eliane to create a piece for her new instrument. Their meetings took place during the winter 2012 in France, after which Radigue gave her permission to premiere the piece in the Fall 2013. Three audio pick-ups on the Spring Spyre are analyzed and trained through neural networks to create subtle real time modulations of digital synthesis. The work mode is based on an individual “image” illustrated and evoked within each solo -- where each musician is guided by his or her personal “image.” This provides the essential sound, letting descriptive words and evocations establish a system of communication as the piece is being elaborated. This intuitive-instinctive process guides the performer to the very essence of the composition. Sonami describes the process as akin to oral transmission of ancient traditional music.

Éliane Radigue: OCCAM IX (Laetitia Sonami)- LIVE at ISSUE / October 20th, 2017

Performance
Saturday, February 24th, 2018

ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn

Saturday, February 24th, ISSUE presents Argentine acousmatic composer Beatriz Ferreyra and Obfuscation Morphologies, a new work by Eric Frye. Though they differ in generation, both composers employ kindred methods for orienting sonic surfaces with signature intensity and precision across electroacoustic and computer music. Both Ferreyra and Frye present their work specifically for an eight-channel sound arrangement, a rare listening opportunity.

Beatriz Ferreyra began her composing career incidentally, having been exposed to the musical methods of Pierre Schaeffer and the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, shortly after moving from her native Argentina to Paris in the 1960s. Ferreyra’s passion for unusual sounds jump-started an education that led to the creation of her own entrancing electroacoustic works, as well as collaborations with alternative instrument inventors like Bernard Baschet and assisting roles in the realization of compositions by Schaeffer himself.

Ferreyra has remained active in the five decades since her initial experimentations, including work at the Institute for Electroacoustic Music in Bourges and in the field of music therapy, but official releases of her music have been few and far between. In 2015, her album GRM Works was released via Recollection GRM in collaboration with the Viennese label Editions Mego. The pairing of archival recordings with more recent compositions showcased a remarkable consistency of artistic vision. The Recollection GRM label, which has done fine work reissuing epochal works from the likes of Schaeffer, Luc Ferrari and Bernard Parmegiani, decisively position Ferreyra's overlooked work in the otherwise Male-dominated GRM canon.

Despite her close involvement within the history and development of electroacoustic music in Paris, close inspection of her work reveals distinct inspiration and technique, as the album’s accompanying notes reference everything from alchemy to the Qabalah, always giving the suggestion of the organic -- of elusive and ephemeral natural states amidst her varied use of technology. In her description of 1967 work Demeures aquatiques, Ferreyra outlines “The flow is constantly facing the ebb. Everything lies here [...] I wanted to illustrate the perpetual attempt by the solid and the fluid to interpenetrate via this experimental approach through earth, sea and air: overlapping elements folding inwards, bursting as tiny particles toward soft and flat surfaces.”

In late 2016, Ferreyra performed at the Heroines of Sound festival in Berlin, where she spoke with Hanna Bächer for a Fireside Chat on RBMA Radio about her childhood in Argentina, the first time she heard electroacoustic music, her frustration with the younger generation’s emphasis on rhythm, and the lasting influence of Bernard Parmegiani’s Violostries. Most recently, she has performed at Portugal’s Semibreve festival, and with Pan Daijing, Valerio Tricoli and Werner Dafeldecker at St. Elisabeth Kirche in Berlin.

Eric Frye follows his exceptional 2017 ISSUE performance with Curtis Roads with Obfuscation Morphologies, a work that Fernando Zalamea, professor at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, describes as “an outstanding concrete sheafification of sounds drawing on conceptual motivations coming from Charles Sanders Peirce's studies on nerve excitations.” An early sketch of the piece appeared in excerpted form on Frye's 2015 recording, Some Consequences of Four Incapacities, published by Jeff Witscher's Salon imprint. The liner notes, written by philosophy of mathematics researcher Andrei Rodin, describe the work as “topologically transformed sonic morphologies which trigger hallucinatory reactions through a succinct succession of auditory cues. Frye's sound pieces emerge as an artistic expression of novelty and freedom, which, by Georg Cantor’s popular quote, is indeed the essence of mathematics.”

Eric Frye: Obfuscation Morphologies - LIVE at ISSUE / February 24th, 2018

Performance
Thursday, April 5th, 2018

ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn

Thursday, April 5th, ISSUE is pleased to present the debut NYC showcase of Pacific City Sound Visions, an experimental label helmed by Spencer Clark, well known for his work with seminal noise duo The Skaters (with James Ferraro), and his alternative aliases Tarzana, Fourth World Magazine, and Monopoly Child Star Searchers. The evening features debut American performances from Francesco Cavaliere and Leila Hassan, as well as new work from Lieven Martens Moana and Clark’s own Typhonian Highlife project.

Berlin-based Italian sound artist Francesco Cavaliere presents one of his “audio stories” -- an invented mythological narrative surrounded by abstract electronic music, presented in Italian with english subtitles. After years of live performance and intense studio work, Francesco has developed a unique style using his voice and an incredible archive of homemade sound effects as his primary sound sources. Inspired by extended, fragmented surfaces from literature and film, Cavaliere has iteratively developed a veritable dictionary to catalogue the strange beings that inhabit his universes, undefined by reference points: hybrids of objects, minerals, animals, plants, planets, trails, cosmic objects and physical and perceptual phenomena. For this performance, Cavaliere presents work described as “a design of dust and debris on some magic sand...a highly dangerous archaeo-cosmic zone.”

Francesco Cavaliere - LIVE at ISSUE / April 5th, 2018

Performance
Saturday, March 31st, 2018

ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn

Saturday, March 31st, ISSUE presents Parisian-born artist Félicia Atkinson presenting a brand new performance involving an imaginary dialogue between the poems of Francis Ponge (1899-1988) and texts of her own, in French and in English, accompanied by electronics, voice and piano. The evening also features Afrikan Sciences & Sassacyprigo presenting a performance of nuanced soundscapes, mindful movements, and rhythms that conjure different temporalities.

Atkinson’s distinct practice incorporates diffuse poetic atmospheres and pointillistically rendered sounds that constantly suspend and re-introduce themselves. Often moving to emphasize the relationship between music and sculpture -- sound and its spatialization -- Atkinson’s work concentrates upon the implicit narrative of a “poetics of things” happening in sound. Here, like in the poems of Ponge, a profound “readymade” empathy toward objects, technology, and music emerges. Atkinson is also co-director for the label Shelter Press alongside Bartolomé Sanson, which has released works from Ben Vida, Gábor Lázár, Tomoko Sauvage, D/P/I, Stephen O’Malley, and others.

"La nuit parfois ravive une plante singulière dont la lueur décompose les chambres meublées en massifs d'ombres." The night sometimes revives a singular plant whose glow breaks down the room furnished in masses of shadows" -- Francis Ponge, The Candle (La Bougie) in Le Parti Pris des Choses / The Nature of Things, 1942

Emerging from a long lineage of musical structures born from the difficult social and political conditions of race relations, Afrikan Sciences uses electronic instruments as a medium for open-ended explorations of form and composition across the musical linguistic heritage of African-American music, while Sassacyprigo’s free-form dance stylings channel intuitive action and a continuous “soul survivalist” strength to live free.

“As a human being, I find that I’m at constant battle between the imposed power structure’s ways of looking at freedom and actually living free,” Sassacyprigo states. “It is within my search for personal voice and belonging that I create.”

This program is curated by writer and media theorist DeForrest Brown Jr. Concerned with speculative futures in performative contexts, Brown is part of the cataloguing space Elevator to Mezzanine and was ISSUE's 2017 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow.

Recorded by Bob Bellerue / Mixed by James Emrick

Félicia Atkinson - LIVE at ISSUE / March 31st, 2018

Performance
Saturday, June 9th, 2018

ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn

Saturday, June 9th, ISSUE is thrilled to present a rare U.S. performance from celebrated Paris-based Argentinian artist Horacio Vaggione, composer of electroacoustic and computer-assisted music and pioneer of micromontage, granular synthesis, and microsound.

As early as the 1960s, Vaggione began coupling his compositional work with computation as a means of transposing digital concerns to the instrumental level. His music is characterized by lively, often violent colors, but also by subtle relationships that are set up between acoustic instruments and recorded or computer-generated elements. For Vaggione, composing is a process of generating veritable, unique events and articulating them within a multiplicity of timescales, scalable within ever-expanding digital environments. Vaggione parses through tense and often false dichotomies between multiplicitous and univocal sonic elements, with granular sound positioned and manipulated without the unity of the sound source being lost. His compositions concern morphology (the study of the forms of things) by building sturdy structures from these minute grains, bringing the ear to a sonic world made up of atoms forming and reforming in their cohesion. Here, a snare drum can be defined merely by the sharpness of its timbre -- the rubbing, bouncing, and multiphonic spread of its impact deconstructed and emphasized by software.

Having not performed in New York in decades, at ISSUE Vaggione presents three recent works: PianoHertz (2012) and Mécanique des fluides (2015), both released on the 2017 empreintes DIGITALes CD Fluides, as well as the brand new work Timpani (2018). PianoHertz was composed from a collection of piano sounds that Vaggione played, recorded, and expanded digitally with the intention to foster the birth of multiple classes -- some retaining the dynamic traits of the original sounds while others representing radical mutations. Vaggione describes Mécanique des fluides as differentiating between laminar (smooth) sounds and turbulent (intermittent) sounds as a means of articulating associated levels of polyphonic activity within a conception of sound as fluid. Timpani has never been heard publicly.

The evening opens with a performance from 51717, the intuitive language of New York-based artist Lili Schulder, presenting new work that explores themes of “Perfected Fear” described in the rabbinic literature of Genesis Rabbah, as well as the exorcism of anguish as it has become understood within Jewish Meditation and the interpretations of Reb Nachman of Bratslav.

51717 takes the droning and whispered sounds of the synagogue as a point of departure, interpreting Reb Nachman’s “still small voice” to become a sonic “scream in the mind” that channels and re-codes loudness through a subdued and meditative practice. Using field recordings from domestic settings and site specific locations in Poland and Germany, and techniques of repetition, moving stillness, restraint, and tension, 51717 keeps her sonic sources hidden, rather focusing on the transmission and decay of overwhelming thematic elements into minor sonic forms. Here, her work touches on implicit musical tensions between noise and silence, language and sound, material and transcendence -- dichotomies that often form the binaristic conditions that are confronted and deconstructed within meditative and ritualistic practice.

Recorded by Bob Bellerue / Mixed by James Emrick

Horacio Vaggione - LIVE at ISSUE / June 9th, 2018

Performance
Sunday, May 27th, 2018

ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn

“Rational conduct depends not only upon knowing what is really happening and being able to interpret it, but on having present in our minds a representation of what is going to happen next. This representation is not an account of what is the case, but a continuous prognosis of what is about to be reported to us as being the case. It is a prognosis continuously corrected by feedback.”
-- Stafford Beer

Sunday, May 27th, ISSUE is pleased to present the final evening of Regenerative Feedback: On Listening And Its Emancipatory Potential, a three day symposium of talks, presentations, discourse, and performances centered around biological, social, political and cognitive negotiations in music. Experimental in form, each evening of Regenerative Feedback explores various ethical dimensions, historical circumstances, and cultural resonances of musical artifacts through a series of individual presentations, a roundtable conversation guided by a moderator, interlocuting performances, and extended Q&As.

Taking the general heading SIGNAL/MODEL/FEEDBACK as a point of departure, the Sunday event features presentations by composer of “NIHILIST QUEER REVOLT MUSIK” Dreamcrusher, performance theorist Marielle Pelissero, Oakland-based multidisciplinary sound artist Neha Spellfish, Stockholm-based cultural theorist Jon Lindblom (with work mainly focusing on rehabilitating the grand dimensions of cultural and aesthetic modernism), and author and scholar Paul Rekret. The panel is moderated by Colin Self. In addition, the evening also features interlocuting performances from London-born producer, writer and DJ Flora Yin-Wong, as well as Colin Self presenting a talk and demonstration of Xhoir, a non-utilitarian choir focused on alternative modalities of group singing.

Regenerative Feedback: Signal/Model/Feedback - LIVE at ISSUE / May 27th, 2018

Performance
Thursday, March 21st, 2019

ISSUE Project Room
Presenting at First Unitarian Congregational Society

Thursday, March 21st, ISSUE presents artist and electronics visionary Mark Fell, returning to ISSUE for the first time since 2015 to premiere an untitled new piece with cellist, composer, and improviser Okkyung Lee. The evening also features Kara-Lis Coverdale and LXV, collaborators on joint album Sirens, each presenting new solo work.

Philadelphia-based producer LXV performs a long-form grouping that expands upon his recent interests in varying forms of rhythmic texture and sculpting fields of sound out of processed human voice and sampled and synthesized media.

LXV is the most recent project by U.S. producer David Wesley Sutton. Using the LXV project Sutton spatially arranges processed voices, digital fragments and fractured synthesized and sampled media into virtual sound environments and complex rhythmic contraptions that imbue existential inquiry, the universality of consciousness, and the expressions and compulsions of the human condition within the modern landscape.LXV has been described as ''Sleek jagged contraptions, reflect virtual utopianism... Sonics with a tangibly and refreshingly different grain- cold, clear, uncompromising and pretty exquisite'' -- (Adam Harper, WIRE Magazine). "Concisely and evocative, as opposed to materiality... perfectly complementary exploration of the spirit-mind" (Sonia Garcia, Noisey) Early in 2019 LXV released "Payload" a full length of sounds inspired by the mutability of information as well as outsider music and sound art.

Video Documentation: https://issueprojectroom.org/video/lxv

Recorded by Bob Bellerue / Mixed by James Emrick

LVX - LIVE at First Unitarian Congregational Society / March 21st, 2019

Performance
Thursday, March 21st, 2019

ISSUE Project Room
Presenting at First Unitarian Congregational Society

Thursday, March 21st, ISSUE presents artist and electronics visionary Mark Fell, returning to ISSUE for the first time since 2015 to premiere an untitled new piece with cellist, composer, and improviser Okkyung Lee. The evening also features Kara-Lis Coverdale and LXV, collaborators on joint album Sirens, each presenting new solo work.

For this special performance, Kara-Lis Coverdale performs new solo work exclusively on the pipe organ at First Unitarian Congregational Society, a Hutchings organ registered with the New York City branch of the American Guild of Organists. Driven by a patient devotion to space, Coverdale’s compositions exist between erudite computer music and acoustic melancholy, seen in her hybrid organ and piano works mediated by electronics and digital interfaces. Coverdale is a classically and academically trained musician with a Masters degree in musicology and composition from Western Ontario University and has worked as an organist at Montreal's St. John Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church. She has since collaborated with artists including Tim Hecker, specifically contributing to his acclaimed albums Virgins, Love Streams, and Konoyo. Her praised album Grafts, recently released on Boomkat Editions, is described as “uncompromisingly distinct while redolent of modal minimalism, 70s, new age, and folk music, hovering in the half-light between acoustic and electronic refinement.”

Kara-Lis Coverdale was born in Burlington, Canada, and began studying with the Royal Conservatory of Music from age 5. Her grandparents were immigrants from Estonia. She later went on to complete with degrees in musicology and composition, for which she wrote a Masters thesis “Sound Rhetoric, and the Fallacy of Fidelity,” a seed to Coverdale’s infatuation with the mutability of the real. Coverdale has worked as organist and music director at several churches across Canada since age 13, where she has also served as choir conductor. She is recipient of a “remising young artist” award by Canadian new music composer Ann Southam, has held residencies with GRM Paris, EMS Stockholm, FUGA Zaragoza and others, and presents original performances, commissions, collaborations, and installations all over the world including The Barbican, Theatre du Chatelet, AGO, MAC Montreal, Filharmonia Krakowska, Teatro Circo, Kraftwerk, and Elbphilharmonie.

Video Documentation: https://issueprojectroom.org/video/kara-lis-coverdale-solo-organ

Recorded by Bob Bellerue / Mixed by James Emrick

Kara-Lis Coverdale: Solo Organ - LIVE at First Unitarian Congregational Society / March 21st, 2019

Performance
Saturday, May 4th, 2019

ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn

Saturday, May 4th, ISSUE presents American musicians Jeff Witscher and Jack Callahan premiering new collaborative and solo work: What Happens on Earth Stays on Earth, Surviving Sound Music, and 106 Kerri Chandler Chords. Although both artists are known for their discrete compositions and far-ranging work under various monikers, recently they have been forwarding primary descriptors such as “Music Art” and “Sound Music” as formal headings that re-assert the simplicity of their own respective practices. The evening features a new collaborative work made specifically for ISSUE, and two new solo works. Witscher returns to ISSUE for the first time since 2013’s PAN_ACT festival. This is Callahan’s ISSUE debut.

Witscher & Callahan's What Happens on Earth Stays on Earth is a new piece for multiple speakers examining the banality of the human drama in the 21st century. Begun in 2017 as an idea, WHOESOE consists of a series of prompts given to a number of speakers, whose responses are recorded. From this material the piece is organized. The work presented is one of many possible realizations of the piece.

Witscher’s Surviving Sound Music is a new work which presents an unhinged narrative using musical elements and spoken texts. Raiding all genres to create sound disorientation and communicate everyday thoughts in tandem with each other, the piece continues Witscher’s identification with radio art -- for its techniques, using music, sound and voice to assert hybrid narrative. This piece also specifically references Witscher’s “Sound Music,” his term for the overlap between electronic composition, computer music and sound art.

Jeff Witscher (b.1983, Long Beach, Ca.) is a musician who currently manages his own custodial and maintenance company Vincent’s Expert Cleaners in Portland, Or. He has recorded under many different names, Rene Hell perhaps being the most known. He focuses primarily on sound composition as well as video works for his live performances. Recent solo recordings include Approximately 1,000 Beers (2018), Fy Monkey Sisaj Kura (2017), Cob Music (2016), Bifurcating a Resounding No! (2014) and Vanilla Call Option (2013).

Recorded by Bob Bellerue / Mixed by James Emrick

Jeff Witscher: Surviving Sound Music - LIVE at ISSUE / May 4th, 2019

Performance
Friday, June 28th, 2019

ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn

For her second residency performance, 2019 Artist-In-Residence Charmaine Lee premieres “Laminals II,” the second of three movements for a new long-form piece for solo voice. With particular attention given to amplification, feedback, and physical technique, this movement further examines the possibilities of augmentation, distortion, and transformation of the human voice.

The solo piece is followed by a duo with noise and visual artist Victoria Shen in a collaboration highlighting their individual practices of physicality (of voice, body, and technology) in relation to performance and sound.

Charmaine Lee is a New York-based vocalist. Her music is predominantly improvised, favoring a uniquely personal approach to vocal expression concerned with spontaneity, playfulness, and risk-taking. Beyond extended vocal technique, Charmaine uses amplification, electroacoustic feedback, and microphones to augment and distort the voice. She has performed with leading improvisers Nate Wooley, id m theft able, and Joe Morris, and maintains ongoing collaborations with contemporaries Lester St. Louis, Conrad Tao, Zach Rowden, and Leila Bordreuil. She has performed at the Met Breuer, ISSUE Project Room, Roulette, the Stone, the Kitchen, and MoMA PS1. As a composer, Charmaine has been commissioned by the Wet Ink Ensemble (2018) and Spektral Quartet (2018). She is currently an Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room (2019).

Victoria Shen is a musician, visual artist, and instrument maker native to San Francisco and working out of New England. Shen's sound practice is concerned with the spatiality/physicality of sound and its relationship to the human body. Shen’s music floods its location acting as a form of sculpture. Her music features analog modular synthesizers (Flower Electronics), contact microphones, and other self-built electronics. These instruments are designed to electronically create chaotic systems, systems which are highly sensitive to small changes in their initial parameters. The resulting music eschews conventions in harmony and rhythm in favor of the extreme textures and gestural tones. Shen's multidisciplinary visual work operates within the space where science, technology, craft, and art history overlap. Shen has performed solo across North America, Japan, Mexico and Western Europe as Victoria Shen and Evicshen and as half of the duo TRIM in North America and the UK. She has also been an artist in residence at Elektronmusikstudion EMS Stockholm, Sweden and WORM Rotterdam Netherlands.

Recorded by Bob Bellerue / Mixed by James Emrick

Charmaine Lee: Laminals II with Victoria Shen - LIVE at ISSUE / June 28th, 2019

Performance
Friday, November 1st, 2019

ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn

Asha Sheshadri’s work involves the unpredictable observation of and response to a personal and political network of relays -- archival fields coexisting in entropy -- that operate within our collective worlds and imperfect memories. She describes that reading annotations from a book marked up by another, capturing an observational voice memo on a phone, or salvaging footage from a damaged tape are gestures that may produce source material for a fictional letter, a suggestion of an ethnography, soundtrack, or map of a speculated immigration. These, in turn, may result in a composition, an object, a movement or manifesto. Her work, often taking the form of essayistic videos, recordings, readings, and performances, follows these relays towards creating environments from musical and non-musical artifacts alike -- a kind of "affective collaging” concerned with the personal deconstruction and re-assemblage of archival objects and documents.

Asha Sheshadri is a New York based artist. Her multivalent work commingles memory construction, questions of citation and translation, and lost or silenced histories and diasporas. In her essayistic videos, recordings and performances, she layers her own voice with original writing, text sourced from found documents, places, and people she admires, creating environments of musical and non-musical artifacts alike. She was an affiliated fellow at the American Academy of Rome, earned an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, and is an alum of the Whitney Independent Study Studio program. Her work has been exhibited and performed at spaces including Artists’ Space, Vox Populi, and the MIT List Visual Arts Center. To date, her recordings have been released on Further Records, Entr’acte, and Recital Program, with a forthcoming work to be released on the Anomia imprint.

Asha Sheshadri - LIVE at ISSUE / November 1st, 2019

Performance
Saturday, May 4th, 2019

ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn

Saturday, May 4th, ISSUE presents American musicians Jeff Witscher and Jack Callahan premiering new collaborative and solo work: What Happens on Earth Stays on Earth, Surviving Sound Music, and 106 Kerri Chandler Chords. Although both artists are known for their discrete compositions and far-ranging work under various monikers, recently they have been forwarding primary descriptors such as “Music Art” and “Sound Music” as formal headings that re-assert the simplicity of their own respective practices. The evening features a new collaborative work made specifically for ISSUE, and two new solo works. Witscher returns to ISSUE for the first time since 2013’s PAN_ACT festival. This is Callahan’s ISSUE debut.

Witscher & Callahan's What Happens on Earth Stays on Earth is a new piece for multiple speakers examining the banality of the human drama in the 21st century. Begun in 2017 as an idea, WHOESOE consists of a series of prompts given to a number of speakers, whose responses are recorded. From this material the piece is organized. The work presented is one of many possible realizations of the piece.

Callahan will present a new iteration of 106 Kerri Chandler Chords for voice and computer, a work derived from his project Housed, an archive of (currently) 850 chords from classic House tracks Callahan collected in 2016, which was released on NNA Tapes and is currently being turned into an online archive. The piece is a primary example of Music Art.

Jack Callahan (b. 1990) is a composer and sound engineer based in New York. He received a BA in Music Composition & Theory from Hampshire College in 2012. In 2011 he studied privately with Jürg Frey in Aarau, CH. Since 2013 Callahan has been primarily working under the moniker die Reihe, taken from the journal edited by Herbert Eimert and Karlheinz Stockhausen. With this project he has toured the both the U.S. and Europe multiple times and has released music with labels such as Anomia, Ascetic House, NNA Tapes, Salon. In 2013 he founded Banh Mi Verlag, an imprint dedicated to contemporary experimental music and culture. As a composer his music has been performed internationally by ensembles such as the S.E.M. Ensemble, the Wet Ink Ensemble, So Percussion, the Janacek Philharmonic Orchestra, the Dog Star Orchestra. He currently curates the concert series Pennies from Heaven in collaboration with Control Synthesizers and Electronic Devices in Brooklyn. In 2018 he co-authored the manifesto Toward Agave Expressionism with Alec Sturgis. This lead to the establishment of the festival Neo-Pastiche: Changes in American Music which will take place in Asheville, NC in April 2019.

Recorded by Bob Bellerue / Mixed by James Emrick

Jack Callahan (die Reihe): 106 Kerri Chandler Chords - LIVE at ISSUE / May 4th, 2019

Performance
Thursday, January 23rd, 2020

ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn

Thursday, January 23rd, ISSUE is pleased to present Just The Right Height, the solo music project of interdisciplinary artist Keke Hunt, and Drumloop, the recent moniker of artist and musician Daffy Scanlan, each presenting new solo work. Both artists chart critical new contexts at the intersection of fragmented narrative, sound design, pop music, song, and experimental composition.

Daffy Scanlan’s work has long drawn on the lines between electronic and organic sonics. Composing climatic melodies scaled up to expansive, affecting vistas, Scanlan combines heavily processed vocals and poetic storytelling -- exploring fragmented collage and pop stylings in equal measure. A skilled pianist as a child, she worked between analog gear and Fruity Loops throughout her youth, releasing harsh noise and power electronics on a string of labels. But it was after her suitcase was stolen in 2017, containing almost all of her music equipment that Scanlan dove deep into FL Studio, turning a trying moment into an opportunity for deep sonic exploration of the software. The result were compositions with extensive nuance, accents, and details all flecked with digital detritus and swirling waves of echo -- hovering between emotional meltdown and resilience. In 2018, Scanlan released her debut album Revenge Body as Drumloop via Sweat Equity. She continues to self-release tracks through SoundCloud.

Daffy Scanlan is an artist from New Jersey, who is currently based in New York City. Her work explores the transportation of objects / language through time and space, channeling their degeneration and disembodiment. She combines cracked and broken textures with dinged color stories, creating portals into a canon of abuse and trauma. Her compositions resemble cornucopias of disintegrating figures, like glowing bunches of archaic characters. She believes disappearing is equal to omnipresence.

Drumloop - LIVE at ISSUE / January 23rd, 2020

Performance
Friday, July 19th, 2019

ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn

Friday, July 19th, ISSUE and Harvestworks present acclaimed New Zealand-based artist and musician Michael Morley presenting Music for The Never Quartet, a new piece exploring the sonic possibilities of the acoustic guitar as a pure resonant amplifier of sound. Perhaps best known as one third of the Dead C, an enduring free rock unit that has pushed the proto- and post-punk templates to exhilarating points of disintegration for the past three decades, Morley has also recorded music as Gate, the Righteous Yeah, the F—k Chairs, and Sun Valley, as well as under his own name across a range of genre.

Michael Morley’s Music for The Never Quartet is a performative installation for a quartet of bowed acoustic guitars placed on solid wooden furniture. The guitar bodies amplify the bowed strings, which the furniture further amplifies, creating a lush and generous sound field. The quartet modifies the collective sound with the addition of wooden blocks, bowls, and rods placed atop and underneath the instruments. The audience is encouraged to move around the space to experience the sound from multiple vantage points. However, Morley explains that “remaining in one place allows for the shifting time signatures of the different vibrating strings to wash [over] the listener.” The audience is also welcome to record the performance on their mobile devices to be played back as loops during the installation.

This is the fourth year in an ongoing program collaboration between ISSUE Project Room and Harvestworks, two organizations that are committed to supporting the creation and presentation of experimental performance practices while sharing resources.

Michael Morley is a New Zealand based sound artist and visual artist. His work across a range of genre confirms his abilities as an artist, composer, improvisor, performer, and producer. Responsible for over 100 audio releases from 1985 to 2019 as: Gate, The Dead C, The Righteous Yeah, The Fuck Chairs, Sun Valley, and many other collaborations and solo recordings. The development of Music for The Never Quartet has come from a thirty year exploration of the guitar and of sound as art. The focus of the acoustic guitar as the nexus of an examination of sound comes from a desire to provoke and create experimental music that challenges the status quo of the hierarchy of rock and popular musics and allows for a reimagining of the idea of performance and composition.

Michael Morley: Music For The Never Quartet - LIVE at ISSUE / July 19th, 2019

Performance
Saturday, July 27th, 2019

ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn

Saturday, July 27th, ISSUE presents a special “end of season” program gathering three singular artists working across avant-garde rhythmic music. The evening showcases Actress, the alias of British electronic musician and producer Darren J. Cunningham -- widely celebrated for hybridizing known genres within electronic music and operating on the cutting-edge of club culture. Composer, percussionist, and sound artist Susie Ibarra presents “Rhythm Cycles (for Drumset),” while “rhythmanalyst” Speaker Music (DeForrest Brown Jr.) premieres a new piece “Her Velocity; like a foreign (after)image, renders her opaque.”

Susie Ibarra’s “Rhythm Cycles” is a set of pieces that examine rhythm through shifting melody, texture, tempo, polyrhythms, while maintaining cycles. It is both a study and a meditation in rhythm. A virtuosic composer, percussionist and improviser, Ibarra is known for her innovative style and exquisitely global essence, coupling a profound respect for indigenous musics with a unique sense of the avant-garde. Ibarra’s solo performances have been noted for their dynamic range and expressive technique, as well as her incorporation of diverse styles and influences. Her sound has been described as “a sound like no other, incorporating the unique percussion and musical approach of her Filipino heritage with her flowing jazz drumset style,” by Modern Drummer Magazine.

Susie Ibarra is a Filipina-American composer, percussionist, and sound artist. Her compositions are sometimes described as “calling up the movements of the human body; elsewhere it’s a landscape vanishing in the last light, or the path a waterway might trace” (New York Times). Recent commissions include Kronos String Quartet’s 50 for the Future Project Pulsation, PRISM Saxophone Quartet + Percussion’s Procession Along the Aciga Tree, Talking Gong trio with pianist Alex Peh and flautist Claire Chase, film score When the Storm Fades directed by Sean Devlin, and a multimedia game piece Fragility: An Exploration of Polyrhythms for Asia Society. Susie Ibarra is a 2019 United States Artist Fellow in Music. She is a 2018 Asian Cultural Council Fellow in support of her sound research of An Acoustic Story on Climate Change: Himalayan Glacier Soundscapes. She is recording and researching sound along the Ganges from source to sink in collaboration with glaciologist and geomorphologist Michele Koppes. Ibarra leads the DreamTime Ensemble, which recently released the album Perception, a suite of music exploring memory and shifting sensory experiences. In 2017 the album was chosen in in a top ten playlist for the NYTimes and featured in WBGO's Take Five Gives the Drummer Some with featured Drummer-Led records. She performs in collaborative ensembles Mephista, Yunohana Variations, and LIMBS. Always curious about different ways to think about and play rhythm, Susie Ibarra is collaborating most recently with ThinkFun! Games and Splice.com. With ThinkFun Games, Ibarra is inventing an interactive polyrhythm board game to teach rhythms. With Splice.com Sound Samples and launched on Splice Originals a sound sample packet, Experimental Percussion with Susie Ibarra in Dec 2018. In July, 2019 Splice Originals will launch a second sound packet with built e-music instruments to play her percussion sounds. Since 2012, she has been a faculty member at Bennington College where she teaches percussion, drumset, composer /performer ensembles, improvisation, and art intervention. Susie Ibarra is a Yamaha, Vic Firth, and Paiste Drum Artist.

Susie Ibarra: Rhythm Cycles (for Drumset) - LIVE at ISSUE / July 27th, 2019

In celebration of her recently back in print novels "Speedboat" and "Pitch Dark", author Renata Adler reads from both works at 155 Freeman St as part of ISSUE Project Room's Littoral reading series in April 2013. 

http://issueprojectroom.org/event/renata-adler

When Speedboat (1976) burst on the scene in the late ’70s it was like nothing readers had encountered before. It seemed to disregard the rules of the novel, but it wore its unconventionality with ease. Reading it was a pleasure of a new, unexpected kind. Above all, there was its voice, ambivalent, curious, wry, the voice of Jen Fain, a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of contemporary urban America. Party guests, taxi drivers, brownstone dwellers, professors, journalists, presidents, and debutantes fill these dispatches from the world as Jen finds it.

Pitch Dark (1983) is a book of questions, a book of false starts, red herrings, misunderstandings, and lightning revelations. It is a book about love. Kate Ennis is poised at a critical moment in an affair with a married man. The complications and contradictions pursue her from a house in rural Connecticut to a brownstone apartment in New York City, to a small island off the coast of Washington, to a pitch black night in backcountry Ireland. And no matter where Kate goes or what she does, she confronts the mystery and inscrutability of others, and herself.

Renata Adler was born in Milan and raised in Connecticut. She received a B.A. from Bryn Mawr, an M.A. from Harvard, a D.d’E.S. from the Sorbonne, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and an LL.D. (honorary) from Georgetown. Adler became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1963 and, except for a year as the chief film critic of The New York Times, remained at The New Yorker for the next four decades. Her books include A Year in the Dark (1969); Toward a Radical Middle (1970); Reckless Disregard: Westmoreland v. CBS et al., Sharon v. Time (1986); Canaries in the Mineshaft (2001); Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker (1999); Irreparable Harm: The U.S. Supreme Court and The Decision That Made George W. Bush President (2004); and the novels Speedboat(1976, winner of the Ernest Hemingway Award for Best First Novel) and Pitch Dark (1983).


Renata Adler reads from "Speedboat" and "Pitch Dark", 4/2013

Philosopher, artist, and avant-garde composer Henry Flynt joins WKCR's Tommy McCutchon and ISSUE Project Room artistic director Lawrence Kumpf  Wednesday, June 20th to discuss and listen to rare and never before heard selections from his diverse body of work, as well as his participation in PAN_ACT, a June 2013 festival at ISSUE Project Room.

Henry Flynt on WKCR - 6/20/13

ISSUE Project Room is a non-profit center for innovation, discovery, development, and presentation of new music, sound, dance, performance, literature, video, and film.

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