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.
Mark Fell premieres a generative multichannel piece in collaboration with 2011 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Okkyung Lee based on Indian rhythmic structures using FM synthesis. Having previously collaborated with Lee on “A Pattern for Becoming,” later released as a limited cassette, the two also have an improvisational rapport after performing together as a part of Lee’s 2015 residency at Cafe Oto -- a performance described as “two extremes, equal in energy, intensity, and affect.” Both artists have long-standing performative histories at ISSUE and expansive independent bodies of work that have made vital contributions to their respective fields of contemporary experimental music. They have never before performed together in the United States.
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.”
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.
Mark Fell is a Rotherham-based electronic musician, multidisciplinary artist and producer whose work has persistently challenged the boundaries between dance music and academic computer music practices. Having studied experimental film and video at Sheffield’s notorious Psalter Lane art school at the onset of the city’s techno era (circa 1990), Fell’s approach is equally grounded in the theory and practice of experimental film, radical philosophy and the electronic music subcultures surrounding house and techno. Since his early genre-defining explorations of minimal techno with Mat Steel as SND in the late 90’s, Fell’s practice moved into a period of complex dynamic works such as Multistability (Raster-Noton, 2011), and more recently into explorations of interplay between algorithmic systems and acoustic performance, typically including choreographic and text based elements. Widely acknowledged for his unique contributions to electronic music and sound art, Fell’s work has been presented at a vast variety of major institutions around the world, marking him out as a distinctive voice in contemporary art and music.
Okkyung Lee is a cellist, composer, and improviser who moves freely between of artistic disciples and contingencies. Since moving to New York in 2000 she has worked in disparate contexts as a solo artist and collaborator with creators in a wide range of disciplines. A native of South Korea, Lee has taken a broad array of inspirations—including noise, improvisation, jazz, western classical, and the traditional and popular music of her homeland—and used them to forge a highly distinctive approach. Her curiosity and a determined sense of exploration guide the work she has made in disparate contexts. Lee is perhaps known best for her improvisational work, where she draws upon visceral extended techniques, in both solo and collaborative contexts. Not content with the static nature of the stage, Lee routinely explores the spaces she performs in, responding to atmosphere, audience, or the objects surrounding her to produce immersive and site-specific experiences. Over the last two decades Lee has collaborated with Arca, David Behrman, John Butcher, Mark Fell, Ellen Fullman, Douglas Gordon, Jenny Hval, Vijay Iyer, Christian Marclay, Bill Orcutt, Marina Rosenfeld, Swans, and John Zorn among others. She has released more than 20 albums as leader or co-leader and currently leads an intricately nuanced Yeo-Neun Quartet featuring harpist Maeve Gilchrist, pianist Jacob Sacks, and bassist Eivind Opsvik that explores the lyrical side of her writing.
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.
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.