ISSUE's 2021 season programs are FREE to stream. In lieu of purchasing tickets, please consider making a $25 suggested donation (or an amount that you feel is meaningful) in support of ISSUE's 2021 commissions and Artist Fund. Enabling the fullscreen function is recommended.
Thursday, April 8th, at 8pm EST, ISSUE presents Remind Me Tomorrow, a program organized in collaboration with artist Cory Arcangel and organist Hampus Lindwall, who have invited a group of artists and musicians to compose new music to be performed on the pipe organ by organists Nils Henrik Asheim (NO), Hampus Lindwall (BE) and Joy-Leilani Garbutt (US).
Remind Me Tomorrow will include compositions by Roc Jiménez de Cisneros (EVOL), Stine Janvin, Seth Price, Akira Sileas, Cory Arcangel and Hampus Lindwall. The night will be virtual and take place in the US, Scandinavia, and Europe, and is the third installment in Arcangel and Lindwall’s series of pipe organ concerts which focus on generating new repertoire for the organ.
In the past this series has featured the premieres of pieces by Ellen Arkbro, Pierre Bismuth, Kara-Lis Coverdale, Tom Crawford, Haley Fohr aka Circuit des Yeux, Hanne Lippard, Haroon Mirza, Charlemagne Palestine, as well as by Cory Arcangel and Hampus Lindwall themselves.
Remind Me Tomorrow is presented in parallel with Arcangel’s exhibition of contemporary art, Century 21, at Greene Naftali Gallery, New York, NY.
Vocalist, performer, and sound artist Stine Janvin presents "Hakken," 2021, a new composition and improvisation working only with the organ pedal keyboard. "Hakken," (sometimes Hakkûh) is a form of rave dance originating from the Dutch hardcore and gabber scene. The name is derived from the Dutch verb hakken which means chopping, or hacking, or refers to the heels of the feet.
Artist Roc Jiménez de Cisneros (EVOL) presents "The Chord Life (for Tom Johnson)," 2021, a piece that is part of an ongoing series of adaptations/alterations of Tom Johnson's infamous 1986 work, “The Chord Catalogue.” Johnson's piece is a very orderly performance of the 8178 chords possible in one octave of a piano. Roc and Stephen Sharp have recently adapted the piece for drum machine for an EVOL double CD, and this one is a rather jumpy take on it, where chords get stuck and reshuffled to create brief instances of ravey weirdness.
Composer, performer, programmer, and lecturer Akira Sileas presents a new piece, "Composition for Two Organs," 2021. By superimposing partials as chords, the piece explores the harmonic spectres that develop from the vibrations and turbulences within the mechanical organ structure. It is an investigation of the pipe organ considered as a machine for manipulating air pressure in harmonic ratios.
Artist Seth Price will present a new organ transcription of "My Composition," 2005, originally presented as part of the album "Working Music," and written for Korg-M1 and treatments.
Cory Arcangel is an artist, composer, curator, and entrepreneur living and working between Stavanger, Norway, and Brooklyn, New York. Recently he has worked on a dizzying array of seemingly unrelated projects; he co-curated with Michael Bell Smith, “The Year in the Internet 2020”, an online show of “links” for the social network Are.na; for the “Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber”, 2019, he created banners of “destroyed jeans” for the facade of the Sharjah Art Museum as well as composed a new work for pipe organ — which was placed into the mix at the Radisson Blu Sharjah gym and later released as a cassette tape by Issue Project Room in 2020. His work is included in many public collections, including the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, MoMA in New York, the Tate in London, Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington D.C., and the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zürich.
Hampus Lindwall is a musical artist active in many fields ranging from contemporary classical to experimental and electronic music. He has released several organ albums, as a soloist and in collaborations. As described by Boomkat, in 2021 Lindwall “drop(d) acid” with a “mind-spanking array of virtuosic acid solos” played on a TB-303 on his recent release, Lost & Found, for the record label Matière-Mémoire. Hampus Lindwall is the Titular Organist in Saint-Esprit, Paris, and professor of improvisation at IMEP, Namur in Belgium.
Nils Henrik Asheim enjoys a combined career as composer and performer. He started out as a composition pupil of Olav Anton Thommessen and made his début at the UNM nordic festival for young composers in Helsinki at the early age of fifteen. He subsequently went on to study organ and composition at the Norwegian Academy of Music and the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam. He has been awarded the EBU Rostrum prize and the Nordic Council Music Prize, among others. Asheim has been acclaimed by critics for his personal style of improvisation on the organ. Since 2012 he has been recognized for his innovative programming work as the resident organist of the new concert hall in Stavanger, Norway.
Joy-Leilani Garbutt is co-founder of Boulanger Initiative and Director of Music at St. Luke's Episcopal Church, San Francisco. Joy-Leilani is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and spent 2018-19 in France pursuing research on early 20th-century French organ music by female composers, particularly Joséphine Boulay, Mel Bonis, Nadia and Lili Boulanger, Jeanne Demessieux, and Marie-Véra Maixandeau. She is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology, and has recently been a student of Dr. Jeremy Filsell and Sophie-Veronique Cauchefer-Choplin. In the spring of 2018 Joy-Leilani co-founded the Boulanger Initiative, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting music composed by women through performance, education, commissions, and advocacy. She holds a Master of Education degree from The Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Master of Music in organ performance from Northwestern University, where she was Organ Scholar for the Alice Millar Chapel. In addition to solo recitals in the U.S. and France, Joy-Leilani has performed with the New England Youth Ensemble in Australia, England, New Zealand, Mexico, and South Africa.
Stavanger-born vocalist, performer and sound artist Stine Janvin works with the extensive flexibility of her voice, and the ways in which it can be used to channel physicality of sound. Created for variable spaces from theatres, to clubs and galleries, and more recently websites and digital platforms, Janvin’s projects focus on exploring performance formats, vocal instrumentation and potential dualities of the natural versus artificial, tangible/digital, and minimal/dramatic. Her most recent works are Chords for Calling for Deutschlandradio Kultur, SOLD(a dog and pony show) and renowned Fake Synthetic Music, from which she earned a Honorary Mention of the Prix Ars Electronica 2019. Janvin is a fellow at Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD in 2020/2021.
Roc Jiménez de Cisneros is an artist. He is part of the computer music group EVOL together with Scottish artist Stephen Sharp. Roc’s work explores processes of deformation, both literally and metaphorically, in graphical pieces, light installations, essays and, especially, music. His recordings have been released by labels such as Diagonal, Editions Mego, Presto!? Superpang or iDEAL among others. His music, both solo and with Sharp, is based on a drastically reductionist approach to musical palette, focusing on very few sound objects at a time. An assemblage of flexing, flexible bass lines and asymmetric beats which makes use of analogies about bending and twisting to stretch some of his favourite cultural icons, from hardstyle arpeggios to 80s house music –– he calls it Acid Mereotopology.
Akira Sileas is an electronic music composer, performer, programmer and lecturer based in England. After self-releasing two EPs containing studies of Cartesian synthesis, Akira's algorithmic modular synthesizer tracks have featured on electronic music labels Superpang and New York Haunted (as Nd:YAG), with recent ambient pieces released through Rusted Tone Recordings. Besides a keen interest in the mechanics of synthesis and sound, Akira's music is deeply influenced by the phenomenological experience of natural and man-made environments, with each release based upon an individual theme informed by visual and textural elements and locations.
Seth Price is an artist who lives in New York.
