Saturday, May 10th at 8pm, ISSUE hosts a live conversation between NYC-based Distant Pairs artists Eden Girma, Madison Greenstone & Suzanne Thorpe at the 22 Boerum Pl. theater. Each artist will present a short solo performance, and collectively discuss the experience of working with their Ukrainian collaborators across locations, languages, and through the simultaneity of war and multiple crises.
As part of ongoing activations of the Distant Pairs Series, throughout May 2025, ISSUE and curatorial platform Time Based will co-present three digital commissions uniting artists based in Kyiv and New York City. The new works will be available to stream on ISSUE’s website, contributing to its expanding online archive and the organization’s commitment to fostering experimental performance and creative exchange across borders and disciplines.
Eden Girma is a composer, vocalist, and multi-instrumental musician hailing from Madison, WI. Having grown up at the nexus of widely varying and vibrant musical traditions, Eden creates through a variety of audio-visual-technological media—bridging realms such as popular music, improvisatory collaboration, expressionism, and experimental electronics. Through a genre-bending ear and a poetic lyricism, their artistic practice and work not only resonate with individual hearts, but bring people closer together in a spirit of intimacy and empathy.
Madison Greenstone is a musician, writer, and clarinetist of TAK Ensemble. Their solo practice, exstatic resonances, explores ‘shatteringly intense’ phenomenological, material and spatial expressivities of sound through richly noisy timbral actions, often performed on the clarinet at a high volume. This work was released to critical acclaim on Relative Pitch Records in 2023. Recently their music explores dreamlike acoustic mirages, spatial interferences of difference tones and beating, and draws inspiration from fiction writer Yoko Tawada's proposition that there is no such thing as a room with a fixed size. Madison performs across the US and internationally as a soloist and chamber musician. They have been presented by the New York Philharmonic, Blank Forms, Cafe Oto (UK), LAMPO, KM28 (DE), ISSUE Project Room, the Vigeland Mausoleum (NO), Night of Surprise (DE), and Bangkok Arts and Cultural Center. As a writer, Madison has contributed critical essays on experimental music to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb (k-verlag), Blank Forms (Alien Roots), Museum of Art and History in Neuchâtel, Contemporary Music Review, and LAMPO Publications. They can be heard on Important Records, Relative Pitch, Longform Editions, Mengi, Another Timbre, Greyfade, Wandelweiser Editions, Impakt Kollektiv among others.
Suzanne Thorpe is an electroacoustic flutist, sound artist and scholar. She couples critical listening with acoustic ecology, improvisation and technology to craft relational and immersive sound engagements that reveal dynamics within human cultures and nature's systems. She has performed and exhibited internationally and has contributed to a significant discography as a founding member of the critically acclaimed American group Mercury Rev. She has received numerous grants, awards and residencies, and has had the distinct pleasure of performing with a heady roster of wonderful performers and improvisers worldwide. Thorpe is currently Assistant Professor of Sound Studies at Manhattan University, a Visiting Scholar at NYU, and remains co-founder and director of TECHNE, a nonprofit arts-education organization dedicated to dismantling social and cultural barriers in technical learning environments.
