Saturday, September 9th, at 8pm ET ISSUE celebrates its 20th Anniversary and Fall 2023 season at the First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn Heights. We host this special event with internationally renowned musician and composer Roscoe Mitchell, joined by composer/clarinetist and 2020 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence John McCowen. The evening also features a performance from BEAM SPLITTER, the duo project of 2008 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Audrey Chen plus Norwegian musician & sound artist Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø.
Join as an ISSUE Project Room Member at any level and receive a free ticket to the performance.
As a tireless explorer of improvisation and multi–instrumental performance, the legendary Roscoe Mitchell joins his one time student and now collaborator John McCowen. In their specially prepared duo performance, McCowen's micro-timbral explorations of the contrabass clarinet meet Mitchell's bass saxophone playing, to create an unusual and dynamic combination of these two rarely heard low end instruments. As part of the collaboration, on the afternoon of Sunday September 10th, Roscoe Mitchell and John McCowen will lead a workshop for students at Brooklyn Music School’s Playhouse.
This year marks the 20th Anniversary of ISSUE and will be celebrated with a series of commissioned programs, orbiting around our annual Gala and affiliated Benefit events. Opening the evening, ISSUE welcomes another past Artist-In-Residence, Audrey Chen, to perform with Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø. Having toured globally since 2015, BEAM SPLITTER have performed close to two hundred concerts, in a wide variety of rooms—from cellars to art spaces to festivals stages, bringing their own brand of closely amplified dialog which is as highly intimate as it is equal amounts raw and exposed. They join together their two individual voices into a distinct language that delves beyond the borders of the corporeal elements of un-processed voice and trombone. On their new release “SPLIT JAW” on Tripticks Tapes and recently on "Rough Tongue" on Corvo Records, the two have brought in the use of simple analogue electronics to offset their hyper extended physical play and have been pushing new territories with this augmented set up.
Featuring artists from across our history as well as new projects, ISSUE’s 20th Anniversary presents an opportunity to celebrate and support the organization as we continue an ambitious calendar of programming. Since its inception in 2003 under the vision of late Founder Suzanne Fiol, ISSUE has evolved from a small East Village garage, to a grain silo on the Gowanus Canal, to a project space in The Old American Can Factory, to now owning our 22 Boerum Place theater as an internationally-recognized leader for fostering experimental cross-disciplinary performance.
Across 20 years of programming, ISSUE has sustained a thriving Artists-In-Residence program, encouraging generations of NYC-based artists to take creative risks in reaching the next stage of their artistic development. ISSUE has also inaugurated the Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellowship, assisting emerging curators to realize ambitious new projects. The organization has bolstered close partnerships within NYC’s cultural ecology, collaborating with like minded nonprofits, galleries, theaters, and non-traditional spaces as we’ve embarked on a period of off-site programming. Bringing commissions, premieres, and rare performances to new contexts and spaces throughout NYC, ISSUE has doubled down on its commitment to artists whose work eludes convention. Join us in recognizing this important milestone in our history.
Roscoe Mitchell is an internationally renowned musician, and composer. His virtuosic resurrection of overlooked woodwind instruments spanning extreme registers, visionary solo performances, and assertion of a hybrid compositional/improvisational paradigm have placed him at the forefront of contemporary music. Mr. Mitchell is a founding member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and the Trio Space. He is also distinguished as the founder of the Creative Arts Collective, The Roscoe Mitchell Sextet & Quartet, The Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble, The Sound Ensemble, The New Chamber Ensemble, and the Note Factory. His instrumental expertise includes the gamut of the saxophone and recorder families, clarinets, flute, piccolo, and the transverse flute in addition to his elaborate invention, the Percussion Cage. His oeuvre boasts hundreds of albums. His vast discography includes “Sound” (1966, 5-star review in DownBeat Magazine), “People in Sorrow” (1969, with the AEOC), “Nonaah” (1977, DownBeat Magazine Record of the Year), “Bells for the South Side” (2017, featured as one of the NYTimes's best jazz albums of the year) and “Discussions” (distinguished on the NYTimes's list of 2017's best classical albums). Mitchell’s honors include the 2020 NEA Jazz Master Fellowship, the United States Artist Award (2019), ASCAP Founders Award (2018), Multiple Reeds Player of the Year: Jazz Journalists Association Jazz Awards (2018), Doris Duke Artist Award and Audience Development Fund (2014), a CMA Presenting Jazz grant (2010), Golden Ear Award, Deep Listening Institute (2009),The Shifting Foundation Grant, Meet the Composer, and the John Cage Award for Music-Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, Inc. Most recently, He has completed several commissions including “CARDS In 3D Colors” for Violin & Piano (Kate Stenberg & Sarah Cahill commission) 2020; Mutable Music commissions: “Sustain and Run” for Orchestra and Solo Improvisors 2020, two pieces of a three-song cycle of Bob Kaufman poems: “To My Son Parker, Asleep in the Next Room” 2020 and “WHO HAS SEEN THE WIND?” 2020 For Baritone and Piano (the third piece will be based on the Kaufman poem “Scene in a Third Eye”); Creative Arts Collective commissions funded by New Music USA: “CARDS: The Detroit Deck” 2020, “CARDS: 11-11-2020” 2020 and “CARDS: The Maple just turned Red” 2020; Commissions for the Metropolis Ensemble (combined ensembles of Immanuel Wilkins Quartet and The Ruckus Ensemble): “LADY MOON” 2021 for the Ruckus Ensemble on Baroque Instruments, “O’CAYZ CORRAL Part Two” 2020 for the Immanuel Wilkins Quartet on modern instruments, “Metropolis At 440 Oakwood Drive” 2020 for the combined Metropolis Ensemble. Additionally, he celebrated two 50-year anniversaries this decade: the AACM's in 2015, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago's in 2019. Active as a visual artist since 1963, with a hiatus in the 1970s and '80s when he concentrated on musical composition, Mitchell was afforded time off-road during the pandemic, in which he began painting very avidly, resulting in a large body of intricately composed, jubilantly colorful, playful works. His recent canvases—including a series of compositionally complex four-by-four foot works—as well as the earliest of his paintings were featured in The Keeper of the Code: Paintings 1963-2022, a retrospective exhibition mounted early in 2023 at Corbett vs. Dempsey gallery in Chicago. This was Mitchell's first solo show, and it was accompanied by a 140-page catalog.
John McCowen is a composer/clarinetist focused on increasing the possibilities of the clarinet. John's multiphonic approach embraces drones, difference tones, and beating harmonics as a means to showcase the compositional potential within a single, acoustic sound source. His work has been described by The New Yorker as “the sonic equivalent of microscopic life viewed on a slide”. Documents of this practice have been released by Edition Wandelweiser, International Anthem, Astral Spirits, SUPERPANG, Dinzu Artefacts, and others. John was a 2017 & 2019 artist-in-residence at Lijiang Studio in Yunnan, China, as well as a 2020 Artist-In-Residence at ISSUE Project Room in Brooklyn. He received the Elizabeth Mills Crothers Award for “Excellence in Music Composition” in 2016 from Mills College. John has worked extensively with Roscoe Mitchell in producing new arrangements and orchestrations of Mitchell’s pre-existing orchestra and chamber works. He currently resides in Reykjavik, Iceland where he teaches Music Improvisation at the Iceland Academy of the Arts. John remains stubbornly dedicated to acoustic phenomena. His works do not utilize amplifier feedback or electronically-generated sounds unless specified.
BEAM SPLITTER - Audrey Chen (US) and Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø (NO) - is a duo for amplified voice, trombone and analog electronics. BEAM SPLITTER have been touring globally since 2015, playing close to two hundred concerts in a wide variety of spaces and contexts, bringing their own brand of highly amplified dialog, which is as intimate as it is equal amounts raw and entirely exposed.The duo’s latest album "SPLIT JAW" was released on Nat Baldwin's Tripticks Tapes in 2023. This bite size format packs an entire universe of their crafted sputter, breath and glitch inside its forty-five minute magnetic tape loop. The album is one third introspective Berlin studio production and the rest, live from a splintering concert given at Wels Unlimited Festival in Austria, their last concert of 2022 where audience and the duo alike giving it their all center of room, split open like hollow bones head to clavicle, muscles twitching and air spewing, breaking ground and mending it with alien hums. Audrey Chen was an ISSUE Project Room Artist-In-Residence in 2008, performed in 2017 with Joan La Barbara & Miguel Frasconi as part of ISSUE's Alumni Collaborations and most recently, in May 2021, created a With Womens Work commission inspired by Beth Anderson's VALID FOR LIFE. BEAM SPLITTER have taken part in larger commissioned works at the Teatro Colon, Buenos Aires and largely conceptualized a theatrical adaptation of MEDEA in front of the Olympic Stadium in Kiev, Ukraine (for butoh dancers and musicians) produced by the Ukho Agency. Since 2020, Audrey and Henrik have been organizing DEDICATED PLAY, an ongoing concert series and collaborative artistic project, where they have invited a diverse array of artists from around the world, primarily from diasporic backgrounds. While spinning a thread through the larger story of migration across continents/oceans and establishing the concept of home in shared relationships, they are seeking to bring together the commonalities of these experiences and express this communication in sonic language and music. In the past two seasons, they have worked and recorded with: Mo’ong Pribadi, Hyunhye Seo, Elaine Mitchener, Mariam Rezaei, Pat Thomas & Orphy Robinson (Black top), Carla Boregas, Mauricio Takara, Mieko Suzuki, Pak Yan Lau, Eivind Lønning & Espen Reinersten (Streifenjunko), Hugo Esquinca and Yara Mekawei.
