Saturday, May 4th, ISSUE presents American musicians Jeff Witscher and Jack Callahan premiering new collaborative and solo work: What Happens on Earth Stays on Earth, Surviving Sound Music, and 106 Kerri Chandler Chords. Although both artists are known for their discrete compositions and far-ranging work under various monikers, recently they have been forwarding primary descriptors such as “Music Art” and “Sound Music” as formal headings that re-assert the simplicity of their own respective practices. The evening features a new collaborative work made specifically for ISSUE, and two new solo works. Witscher returns to ISSUE for the first time since 2013’s PAN_ACT festival. This is Callahan’s ISSUE debut.
Witscher & Callahan's What Happens on Earth Stays on Earth is a new piece for multiple speakers examining the banality of the human drama in the 21st century. Begun in 2017 as an idea, WHOESOE consists of a series of prompts given to a number of speakers, whose responses are recorded. From this material the piece is organized. The work presented is one of many possible realizations of the piece.
Witscher’s Surviving Sound Music is a new work which presents an unhinged narrative using musical elements and spoken texts. Raiding all genres to create sound disorientation and communicate everyday thoughts in tandem with each other, the piece continues Witscher’s identification with radio art -- for its techniques, using music, sound and voice to assert hybrid narrative. This piece also specifically references Witscher’s “Sound Music,” his term for the overlap between electronic composition, computer music and sound art (see diagram below).
Callahan will present a new iteration of 106 Kerri Chandler Chords for voice and computer, a work derived from his project Housed, an archive of (currently) 850 chords from classic House tracks Callahan collected in 2016, which was released on NNA Tapes and is currently being turned into an online archive. The piece is a primary example of Music Art (see diagram below).
Jeff Witscher (b.1983, Long Beach, Ca.) is a musician who currently manages his own custodial and maintenance company Vincent’s Expert Cleaners in Portland, Or. He has recorded under many different names, Rene Hell perhaps being the most known. He focuses primarily on sound composition as well as video works for his live performances. Recent solo recordings include Approximately 1,000 Beers (2018), Fy Monkey Sisaj Kura (2017), Cob Music (2016), Bifurcating a Resounding No! (2014) and Vanilla Call Option (2013).
Jack Callahan (b. 1990) is a composer and sound engineer based in New York. He received a BA in Music Composition & Theory from Hampshire College in 2012. In 2011 he studied privately with Jürg Frey in Aarau, CH. Since 2013 Callahan has been primarily working under the moniker die Reihe, taken from the journal edited by Herbert Eimert and Karlheinz Stockhausen. With this project he has toured the both the U.S. and Europe multiple times and has released music with labels such as Anomia, Ascetic House, NNA Tapes, Salon. In 2013 he founded Banh Mi Verlag, an imprint dedicated to contemporary experimental music and culture. As a composer his music has been performed internationally by ensembles such as the S.E.M. Ensemble, the Wet Ink Ensemble, So Percussion, the Janacek Philharmonic Orchestra, the Dog Star Orchestra. He currently curates the concert series Pennies from Heaven in collaboration with Control Synthesizers and Electronic Devices in Brooklyn. In 2018 he co-authored the manifesto Toward Agave Expressionism with Alec Sturgis. This lead to the establishment of the festival Neo-Pastiche: Changes in American Music which will take place in Asheville, NC in April 2019.