Past Events

Chie Mukai leads an improvisation workshop, sharing experiences from thirty years of site-specific performance and improvisation. This workshop continues a teaching practice begun in 2001, it is free and open to 25 practitioners of sound and movement (RSVP required), and also to an audience of observers.

The artistic alter ego of Tori Kudo, Maher Shalal Hash Baz are a fluid large ensemble of untrained musicians that create arresting indie-pop embracing error, structure, and structurelessness. Accordionist and vocalist à qui avec Gabriel creates stark, ethereal and whispering melodies evoking European folk.

A lovechild of the home recording era, Kubin is among electronic music's most versatile performers, with activities spanning pop, radio plays, electroacoustic music, and works for chamber orchestra. Kubin's music is saturated with enthusiasm for disharmonic pop, industrial noise, and the 20th-century avant-garde.

Legend of the Japanese underground Keiji Haino returns to Brooklyn, taking the stage in a special duo with Tony Conrad. These master improvisers of experimental music first joined forces in 2006, this is their first NY duo appearance since 2009. The dynamic and raw improvising cellist Okkyung Lee opens the evening.

Keiji Haino, prolific icon of Japanese experimentalism, returns to ISSUE with a solo percussion set. He is joined by experimental rock outfits xNOBBQx and X Wave, two high-energy groups out of Brisbane, the heart of Australia's underground.

A shadow puppet play by Cary Loren (Destroy All Monsters) and Tom Carey, "The Legend of Mothman" brings the details of alien existence to light, a humorous fantasy mixed with pop-culture lore, set during Halloween in post-industrial Detroit. Sound by concept band Monster Island. Free show for children at 3pm.

Among Japan’s most adventurous filmmakers, Takashi Makino is known for hallucinatory, non-linear films that treat and sound with equal importance. Tonight he presents "Space Noise 3D", an immersive live cinema work for 16mm and video, preceded by three short films, all featuring the music of Jim O’Rourke.

Percussion and keyboard quartet Yarn/Wire perform with an assemblage of acoustic, modified, electronic, and handmade instruments, presenting the result of close collaborations with an international array of experimental composers: Ann Cleare, Chiyoko Szlavnics, and Øyvind Torvund.

A newly commissioned opera by Elliott Sharp depicts the final moments of philosopher Walter Benjamin’s life in Port-Bou at the French-Spanish border as he flees Nazi-occupied France. Bass/baritone Nicholas Isherwood stars with pianist Jenny Lin, accordionist William Schimmel, and electro-acoustic backgrounds by Sharp.

Solo sets by both artists accompany a new interpretation of John Cage's "Williams Mix" (1952) by Werner Dafeldecker and Valerio Tricoli, approaching the score from a contemporary perspective. In the context of digital audio and live instrumental performance, the work draws on a library of over 2000 pre-recorded sounds.

Clarinetist Carol Robinson and trumpeter Nate Wooley give American and World Premieres of new works by iconoclastic French composers Denis Dufour and Eliane Radigue. Radigue's "Occam" pieces are part of a substantial set of new works composed with a small group of the world’s finest contemporary musical voices.

Electronics manipulator Tim Goss, formerly of the Shadow Ring, appears with Call Back the Giants, an inter-generational duo with his daughter, Chloe Mutter. Vanessa Rossetto conjures evocative visual-soundscapes in a duo with guest TBA. Matt Krefting presents his refined, textural soundscapes in a solo performance.