ISSUE Project Room's 2017 Fall season opens at the First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn Heights with celebrated composer and process-musician William Basinski, Brooklyn-based artist and musician Selwa Abd’s Bergsonist project, and Houston-born digipoet and musician YATTA each in solo performance. Join as an ISSUE Project Room Member at any level and get a free ticket to the performance.
A longtime ISSUE friend, Artistic Advisory Board member, and essential pioneer of extended repetition and disintegration, Basinski’s return to ISSUE follows a profound history with the organization, including the 2014 premiere of “Cascade,” his participation in 10 Years Alive On The Infinite Plain in 2013, his honoring at ISSUE’s Arcadia Gala in 2011, and many years of collaboration throughout ISSUE’s early history.
Active for over three decades, Basinski has a vast body of haunting and melancholic soundscapes that have secured his place as an icon of contemporary experimental music. His most recent work A Shadow In Time is a eulogy to David Bowie that explores the “two artists’ shared concern with how to make time, change, and death their own.” The album’s two tracks have been described as some of his “his most blissful (“A Shadow in Time”) and sorrowful (“For David Robert Jones”)” work to date, furthering his focused study of mourning, loss, and dedication that has become his signature.
YATTA, the performative guise of Sierra Leonean-American musician Yatta Zoker, also performs. Her recently released debut EP Spirit Said Yes!, reissued on NYC imprint PTP, mixes sounds inspired by shamanism, jazz, and drone toward meditative and unsettling ends.
Due to unforeseen complications, Kara-Lis Coverdale will not be able to travel to the United States and perform on September 7th. ISSUE is pleased to announce Bergsonist has been added to the evening's performances.
Brooklyn-based, Moroccan-born Selwa Abd uses the fictional character Bergsonist (derived from Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonism) as her musical guise. For this performance, she has written a sonic ode to the decaying Internet.
Doors open at 7pm.
Selwa Abd is an artist and musician based in NY using multiple mediums to investigate social resonance through divergent conceptual aesthetics (minimalism, techno, music concrete, to name a few). Her practice utilizes her trained design sensibility to filter the objects of intuitive exploration, guided by an impulse to detach subjective meaning from found sonic fragments. Notions of identity, memory, social politics and the ambiguous long-term reliability/stability of our digital networks drive this process.
William Basinski is a classically trained musician and composer who has been working in experimental media for over 30 years in NYC and most recently, California. Employing obsolete technology and analogue tape loops, his haunting and melancholy soundscapes explore the temporal nature of life and resound with the reverberations of memory and the mystery of time. His epic 4-disc masterwork, The Disintegration Loops received international critical acclaim and was chosen as one of the top 50 albums of 2004, and number 2 “Best Ambient Albums of All Time” by Pitchfork Media. The Temporary Residence deluxe LP box-set reissue from 2012 was awarded best re-issue of the year and a score of 10.0 on Pitchfork. Installations and films made in collaboration with artist-filmmaker, James Elaine have been presented in festivals and museums internationally, and his concerts are presented to sold out crowds around the world. Most recently, Basinski was chosen by Music Director, Antony Hegarty to create music for the new Robert Wilson opera, The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic which had its world premiere at the Manchester International Festival in July 2011 and toured Europe in 2012 and North America in 2013. Orchestral transcriptions of The Disintegration Loops by Maxim Moston have been performed at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Queen Elizabeth Hall and La Batie Festival in Geneva, Switzerland.
YATTA is a Houston-born digipoet and musician currently based in NY. Using incantations born of loop pedal drones, folk acoustics, and ecstatic beats, they alchemize and creolize jazz vocals with Krio cries. Past performances have taken place at friends' backyards, several Afrofuturism conferences, The Brooklyn Electronic Music Festival, Powrplnt, MOMA PS1 and about ~74 other places.
