Friday, November 1st, ISSUE presents an expansive gathering of NYC artists working across disciplines. Cellist/composer Leila Bordreuil and guitarist/composer Lee Ranaldo debut an improvised duet, and are then joined by sound artist Stephan Moore, presenting a new collaboration that embarks from their previous trio performance at ISSUE in 2016. Artist Asha Sheshadri stages a new iteration of her essayistic performance practice -- a hybrid process that commingles memory construction, questions of citation and translation, and lost or silenced histories and diasporas. The New York Review of Cocksucking, the ecstatic duo of Michael Foster and Richard Kamerman (members of 2018 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow Queer Trash), also perform.
At ISSUE's 2016 Gala, legendary guitarist Lee Ranaldo, 2016 ISSUE Artist-in-Residence Leila Bordreuil, and Artistic Advisory Council member Stephan Moore presented a first-time collaboration celebrating David Tudor's Untitled 1975/1994. Untitled was inspired by Tudor's Toneburst composition created for the 1975 Cunningham Dance Sounddance. In this November 1st program, Ranaldo & Bordreuil, both of whom often transgress boundaries between instrumental improvisation and noise, create an improvised soundscape before reprising their collaboration with Moore, who works with multi-channel sound systems. Stephan Moore is also known as being the mind behind ISSUE’s Floating Points speaker system, a custom-built 15 channel hemispherical speaker system developed for Suzanne Fiol at ISSUE’s previous home at the Old American Can Factory.
Asha Sheshadri’s work involves the unpredictable observation of and response to a personal and political network of relays -- archival fields coexisting in entropy -- that operate within our collective worlds and imperfect memories. She describes that reading annotations from a book marked up by another, capturing an observational voice memo on a phone, or salvaging footage from a damaged tape are gestures that may produce source material for a fictional letter, a suggestion of an ethnography, soundtrack, or map of a speculated immigration. These, in turn, may result in a composition, an object, a movement or manifesto. Her work, often taking the form of essayistic videos, recordings, readings, and performances, follows these relays towards creating environments from musical and non-musical artifacts alike -- a kind of "affective collaging” concerned with the personal deconstruction and re-assemblage of archival objects and documents.
The New York Review of Cocksucking was formed by Richard Kamerman & Michael Foster via Tinder and by way of Luxury Lounge, where after finally meeting at a noise show in someone's house they promptly decided to forgo all formalities associated with online dating and start a noise duo together instead. Writing for Jazz Right Now, critic Clifford Allen describes the duo as belonging “in a tradition somewhere between John Duncan and Alfred 23 Harth, a path that will continue to fascinate and upend and which is absolutely necessary in this darkly draconian age.”
Leila Bordreuil is a Brooklyn-based cellist and composer working in the realm of improvisation, noise music, and sound art. She accesses concepts as diverse as jazz, contemporary classical, noise, and experimental traditions but adheres to none of them. Her work has been described by the NY times as “steadily scathing music, favoring long and corrosive atonalities.” Driven by a fierce interest in pure sound and inherent texture, Leila challenges conventional cello practice through extreme extended techniques and amplification methods. Her composed works draw from a similar aesthetic and frequently incorporate sound-spatialization by way of site-specific pieces and multichannel installations. Leila's collaborations are numerous and extremely diverse, and currently active projects include: a trio with Bill Nace and Tamio Shiraishi, a duo with sound artist Julia Santoli, a duo with bassist Zach Rowden, an improvised string trio with Sean Ali and Joanna Mattrey, and a duo with techno producer Nick Dawson (Bookworms).
Lee Ranaldo co-founded Sonic Youth in 1981, and has been active from New York for the past 35 years, recording, performing, collaborating with numerous others, producing discs, exhibiting visual art and publishing volumes of poetry and journals. He has performed with partner Leah Singer throughout the world. His recently completed new album, Electric Trim, is out for release. He is music producer for HBO’s VINYL series. His Hurricane Transcriptions (based on wind recordings made during Hurricane Sandy in NYC in 2012), originally written for Berlin’s Kaleidoscop String Ensemble, was recently reduced for performances with Brooklyn’s Dither Electric Guitar Quartet. Recent live performances with Singer, Contre Jour, have been large scale, multi projection sound+light events with suspended electric guitar phenomena that challenge the usual performer/audience relationship via in-the- round staging.
Stephan Moore is a sound artist, designer, composer, improviser, coder, teacher, and curator based in Chicago. His creative work manifests as electronic studio compositions, improvisational outbursts, sound installations, scores for collaborative performances, algorithmic compositions, interactive art, and sound designs for unusual circumstances. He is the curator of sound art for the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, organizing annual exhibitions since 2014. He is also the president of Isobel Audio LLC, which builds and sells his Hemisphere loudspeakers. He was the music coordinator and touring sound engineer of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (2004-10), and has worked with Pauline Oliveros, Anthony McCall, and Animal Collective, among many others. He is a senior lecturer in the Sound Arts and Industries program at Northwestern University.
Asha Sheshadri is a New York based artist. Her multivalent work commingles memory construction, questions of citation and translation, and lost or silenced histories and diasporas. In her essayistic videos, recordings and performances, she layers her own voice with original writing, text sourced from found documents, places, and people she admires, creating environments of musical and non-musical artifacts alike. She was an affiliated fellow at the American Academy of Rome, earned an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, and is an alum of the Whitney Independent Study Studio program. Her work has been exhibited and performed at spaces including Artists’ Space, Vox Populi, and the MIT List Visual Arts Center. To date, her recordings have been released on Further Records, Entr’acte, and Recital Program, with a forthcoming work to be released on the Anomia imprint.
Richard Kamerman has been breaking electronics and crashing computers while trying to coax interesting and unpredictable sounds out of them for over a decade. Occasionally, he has also presented himself as a more serious composer of re-performable written music. Keywords: amplification, magnification, obfuscation, systems design, game theory, patterns, human error, accident, failure. Although a firm believer in the axiom that "one man's trash is another man's treasure," he ceased collecting his instruments from piles of junk left on the curb several years ago, fearing he might bring home bedbugs. Recordings of his solo or collaborative works have been released by Erstwhile Records, Pilgrim Talk, Contour Editions, RRRecords, and Engraved Glass, among others. Kamerman has performed throughout the US as well as internationally in Canada, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Australia.
Michael Foster is a saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist working in the fields of improvisation, noise, jazz, experimental composition, performance art, and other forms of weird music. Foster utilizes extensive instrumental preparations, augmenting his saxophone with amplification, objects, balloons, drum heads, vibrators, tapes, and samples as a method of subverting and queering the instrument’s history and traditional roles. In addition to his work as a performer he is also active as a curator throughout New York City, co-founding "Queer Trash," a curatorial collective focusing on providing visibility to LGBTQIA+ performers engaged in experimental performance practices. His current ensembles include duos with cellist Leila Bordreuil, percussionist Ben Bennett, poet/vocalist Lydia Lunch, Richard Kamerman (as The New York Review of Cocksucking), Ted Byrnes, Claire Rousay, Barker Trio (with Tim Dahl, & Andrew Barker), While We Still Have Bodies (with Sean Ali, Ben Gerstein, & Flin van Hemmen), and many others. In addition to these longstanding projects he often collaborates with Sarah Hennies, Marina Rosenfeld, Weasel Walter, Han Bennink, Joe McPhee, William Parker, Luke Stewart, Brandon Lopez, Dave Rempis, Katherine Young, Michael Zerang, James Ilgenfritz, Pascal Niggenkemper, Mette Rasmussen, Psychic TV, and many others.