Media 2017

Ashley Fure’s Shiver Lung 2, performed by percussionist Ross Karre, features Fure’s signature use of complex timbres drawn from extended instrumental techniques and acoustic “wildness.” Her work is known for how virtuosity and crudeness “face-off,” circling an aesthetic region between embellishment and fact, between sound as a carrier of aesthetic intent and sound as a subsidiary effect of action.

Christian Wolff’s For Trumpet Player was the first piece Nate Wooley received after undertaking the commissioning series. Wooley describes the impetus of commissioning these works as coming from a desire to add music to the solo trumpet repertoire that met a certain aesthetic that felt lacking in the contemporary literature: music with an attention to non-linear forms, an attention to sound and timbre over technical flash, and music that was personal not only within the language of the composer but the player as well.

For his second project as 2017 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow, DeForrest Brown Jr. presents the premiere of Elevator to Mezzanine, a new commissioned project between Brown and Berlin-based artist, musician and writer Steven Warwick taking place at Secret Project Robot.

Jonas Mekas speaks on his film Reminiszenzen aus Deutschland, 1971/1993 (edited 2012), never before screened in the U.S. (running time: 25 minutes). A non-chronological presentation of the filmmaker’s time in German forced labor camps and displaced person camps, the film details a story that begins in 1944 and goes on until 1949.

Saturday, September 9th, Byron Westbrook continues his ISSUE residency with “Threshold Variations,” an immersive environment expanding on the techniques of “Interval/Habitat” presented at Westbrook’s previous residency commission in April, 2017. “Threshold Variations” revisits the experimental staging of “Interval/Habitat,” but focuses more directly on the synaesthetic play between light amplitude and sound volume in relation to the audience’s thresholds of perception.

YATTA, the performative guise of Sierra Leonean-American musician Yatta Zoker, performs at ISSUE's 2017 fall season opening. 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.

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.

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. 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.

Stephan Moore, Scott Smallwood and Suzanne Thorpe present new work as a part of World Listening Day, which pays homage to the experimental legacy of Pauline Oliveros. Together, these artists “sound out” the sonic qualities of ISSUE’s historic McKim, Mead and White Theater at 22 Boerum Place using Paul Geluso’s 3D Sound Object invention.

Sadaf H Nava draws on global influences such as traditional middle eastern instrumentation and vocal technique, free jazz noise violin, deconstructed Dembow and Reggaeton beats, and digital hardcore tendencies, to develop and unconventional palette unraveling within a "post-dj era soap opera."

New York artist Evan Caminiti and San-Francisco-based filmmaker Paul Clipson present an audiovisual collaboration drawing from Caminiti’s most recent album Toxic City Music (Dust Editions 2017) as well as Clipson’s recent 16mm impressions of the “charged metabolism” of city life.