Drawing its participants from the first 10 years of ISSUE Project Room’s Artists-In-Residence Program, AIR Alumni Collaborations is a performance that brings together former ISSUE resident artists in striking new combinations. Eccentric, interdisciplinary, and deeply experimental, the new collaborations showcase the wide-range of approaches found within the ISSUE community, amplifying each artist’s personal aesthetics while drawing unexpected parallels between their work.
Thursday, January 19th, ISSUE presents three first-ever collaborative performances by former ISSUE Artists-In-Residence focusing on highlighting their parallel and divergent performance strategies. Cellist, vocalist, and electronics producer Audrey Chen performs alongside two key members of the collaborative ensemble Ne(x)tworks: renowned vocalist Joan La Barbara and composer, improviser and electro-acoustician Miguel Frasconi. Berlin-based composer and synthesist Doron Sadja pairs his particular style of multi-channel spatialized sound, pristine electronics, dense noise, and immersive light projections with multimedia artist Raul De Nieves’ encompassing narrative and multimedia performance style. MV Carbon performs a new collaboration with media artist Bradley Eros sharing the role of manipulating sound and image on a new project called The Mystery of Spiders -- a sound & projection performance conceptualizing scores based on spider webs.
Curated by Lea Bertucci and Chris McIntyre
Audrey Chen is a Chinese-American musician who was born into a family of material scientists, doctors and engineers, outside of Chicago in 1976. Parting ways with the family convention, she turned to the cello at age 8 and voice at 11. After years of classical and conservatory training in both instruments, with a resulting specialization in early and new music, she parted ways again in 2003 to begin new negotiations with sound in order to discover a more individually honest aesthetic. Over the past decade plus, her predominant focus has been her solo work with the cello, voice and electronics, but she has more recently begun to shift back towards the exploration of the voice as a primary instrument. Recent projects, aside from performing solo, include her long running voices duo with London based artist, Phil Minton, and duos with NYC abstract turntablist, Maria Chavez, French guitarist, Jean-Yves Evrard, BEAM SPLITTER, with Norwegian trombonist, Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø, the “romantic noise duo” AFTERBURNER with Doron Sadja (electronics/light projections), with modular synth player, Richard Scott, with American percussionist, Flandrew Fleisenberg and a collaborative project with German conceptual artist, John Bock. Chen has performed across Europe, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, Taiwan, Brazil, Argentina, Canada and the USA. In 2011, in addition to her performances, she was awarded the prestigious Mary Sawyers Baker Prize, an award that was established to support individual artists living, and working in Maryland. Since 2011, she relocated to Berlin, Germany from Baltimore, MD USA and continues to maintain an active international touring schedule.
Composer/performer Joan La Barbara is renowned for her unique vocabulary of experimental and extended vocal techniques (her “signature sounds”: multiphonics, circular singing, ululation, glottal clicks), influencing generations of composers and singers. Awards and prizes: Foundation for Contemporary Arts John Cage Award (2016); DAAD-Berlin and Civitella Ranieri Artist Residencies; Guggenheim and 7 NEA Fellowships; numerous commissions for chamber ensembles, theater, orchestra, chorus, interactive technology; soundscores for dance, video and film, including electronic/vocal score for Sesame Street. Her multi-layered textural compositions have premiered at Festival d'Automne à Paris, Brisbane Biennial, Lincoln Center, MaerzMusik Berlin, Warsaw Autumn, Holland Festival and many other international venues. Exploring ways of immersing the audience in her music, La Barbara placed the American Composers Orchestra around and among the audience in Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, building her sonic painting “in solitude this fear is lived”, inspired by Agnes Martin’s minimalist art. Artist faculty member of NYU and Mannes/The New School.
Miguel Frasconi is a composer and improvisor specializing in the relationship between acoustic objects and musical form. His instrumentarium includes glass objects, modular electronics, laptop, and constructions of his own design. His recent activities include music for dance, theater and audio books. Miguel worked closely with composers John Cage and James Tenney, and has performed and recorded with composers Jon Hassell, Pauline Oliveros, and Morton Subotnick. In September 2012 his CAGE100 Festival was called "one of the best observances of John Cage's 100th birthday" by the New York Times and included performances by his ensembles The Noisy Toy Piano Orchestra and the John Cage Variety Show Big Band. Miguel's music has been released on New Albion Records, Porter Records, clang.cl and a recording of his string quartets will soon be released on the Tzadik label.
Ne(x)tworks is a collaborative ensemble of musicians creating and interpreting work that examines the dynamic between composition and improvisation. In its live performances, recordings, and educational workshops, the group constantly strives for a meaningful dialogue with the past, present, and future of creative music. For over a decade, Ne(x)tworks has embodied the tradition of the “performing composer.” The group regularly presents evening-length concerts of new and recent works made by its members. Additional repertoire includes open scores by New York School composers and their European counterparts, further experiments by the composer performers of the AACM and SoHo Scene of the 1970’s, the so-called Downtown composers of the 80’s, and commissioned works by like-minded contemporary colleagues.
Doron Sadja is a Berlin based artist, composer, and curator whose work explores modes of perception and the experience of sound, light, and space. Often working with multi-channel spatialized sound, smoke machines, and high intensity lights, Sadja combines pristine electronics with lush romantic synthesizers, dense noise, and immersive light projections to create hyper-emotive sonic architecture. Although each of Sadja’s works are striking in their singular and focused approach, his output is diverse: spanning everything from 25 speaker sound works to stroboscopic smoke and light shows, 360 degree projection pieces, and custom built motorized speaker systems that can precisely track sound around a room. Sadja founded Shinkoyo Records and the West Nile performance space in Brooklyn (RIP), and currently runs the Sound Portraits lecture/listening series in Berlin. Sadja studied Technology in Music and Related Arts at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and received his MFA in Sound Art from Bard College.
Raul De Nieves (b. Morelia, Michoacan, Mexico, 1983) is a multi-media artist, performer, and musician based in Brooklyn, New York. His body of work encompasses narrative painting, decadent multimedia performance (often with his band Haribo), large-scale figurative sculpture, live music, ornamentally crafted shoes, and garments. De Nieves has exhibited widely, including at Mendes Wood DM (Sao Paulo), MoMA Ps1, The Museum of Art and Design, Rod Bianco (Oslo), COMPANY, and elsewhere. He has also performed at Artists Space, BOFFO, The Kitchen, MoMA Ps1, Performa 13, Real Fine Arts, and numerous other venues. In 2015, he was included in Ps1’s Greater New York.
MV Carbon's work is comprised of live music, performance, multi- media installation, video, and animation. Embracing a non-traditional approach to music, she uses stringed instruments, gongs, magnetic tape, amplified objects, electronics and hand-crafted sound devices. Her intention is to provoke an extrasensory awareness through the use of sound, image manipulation, and space. Her current work explores interchangeability, the human mechanism, perceptive states of consciousness, and the empirical force of nature. Carbon has done residencies at EMS (SE), ISSUE Project Room (NY), The Clockower Gallery (NY), and Roulette, (NY). She has composed work for The String Orchestra of Brooklyn and has performed at spaces including The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), PS1-MoMA (NY), The Guggenheim BMW Lab (NY), The Copenhagen Music Theater (DK), ULU (UK), Nefertiti Jazz Club (SE), Socrates Sculpture Park (NY), The Stone (NY), Performa 2011(NY), Roulette (NY), The Sage (UK), Casa Des Artes, (PT), Worm (NL), The Tate Modern (UK), and many more.
Bradley Eros is an artist working in myriad media: experimental film & video, collage, photography, performance, sound, text, contracted and expanded cinema & installation. He is also a maverick curator, composer, designer & investigator. Concepts include: ephemeral cinema, mediamystics, subterranean science, erotic psyche, cinema povera, poetic accidents, musique plastique, narcolepsy cinema & black hole cinema. He has exhibited at 2004 the Whitney Biennial & The American Century, MoMA, PS1, The New York, London & Rotterdam Film Festivals, Performa09, Exit Art, The Kitchen, Millennium, Ocularis, Light Industry, Issue Project Room, Microscope Gallery, Participant Inc, Cabinet, ABC No Rio, White Box, The New York Underground Film Festival, Migrating Forms, Warhol Museum, Pacific Film Archives, SF Cinematheque, No.w.here in London, Lightcone in Paris, Arsenal in Berlin, Image Forum in Tokyo; Collaborated with the Alchemical Theater, the band Circle X, Voom HD Lab, expanded cinema groups kinoSonik & Arcane Project, and currently Optipus (laboratory); He has also worked for many years with the New York Filmmakers’ Cooperative, Anthology Film Archives, & co-directed the Roberta Beck Mercurial Cinema.
He is represented by Microscope Gallery & in the collection of the Whitney Museum.