On Thursday, March 20th at 8pm, ISSUE Project Room presents new projects by NYC-based sound artist and musician Sydney Spann featuring Kiera Mulhern & Duncan Moore, and Berlin-based vocalist Audrey Chen. Between March 20-22, the organization will present new, live performance scores at its 22 Boerum Pl. theater as part of ongoing activations of the With Womens Work Series.
“Reproductive Horror: Big Music Little Earth” is the newest original composition for voice, bagpipe and electronics ensemble by 2022 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Sydney Spann. The composition will be a live companion piece to “Attached or Detached (partial disappearance),” Spann’s 2021 online commission for ISSUE’s With Womens Work Series that expanded on the legacy of Womens Work, a publication and 20th-century touchstone of feminist art-making and New Music. Performing and composing in an ensemble, Spann will be joined by fellow poet sound artist, Kiera Mulhern, as well as bagpiper and intermedia artist, Duncan Moore. This ensemble centers gendered, nonbinary and sexualized voices, particularly foregrounding a narrative of how gendered vocational labor performed to sustain oneself is inextricable from creative practice. Spann’s piece was commissioned by ISSUE on the occasion of this year’s revival of With Womens Work.
Drawing on themes of caregiving, invisible labor, and unassimilated musical knowledge, and on the rich legacy of feminist sound art in NYC, “Reproductive Horror: Big Music Little Earth” will combine nontraditional instrumentation such as baby monitors, alongside synthesis, traditional and experimental bagpipe instrumentation, and voice. For this expansion of the With Womens Work Series, Spann will write Pibroch-inspired parts for Scottish bagpipes, a genre of music often written for the recently departed. They will set voice and electronics to bagpipe tunes, in order to turn grief, desire and disgust into frenetic and beautiful music.
After last performing with ISSUE as part of their duo BEAM SPLITTER at the organization’s 2023 Fall Season Opening and 20th Anniversary celebration, 2008 Artist-In-Residence and musician Audrey Chen returns to ISSUE for With Womens Work. Chen notes she was first drawn to critically acclaimed composer Beth Anderson’s VALID FOR LIFE initially from the title, “as a metaphor and method for the act of creating vibration, touch, resonance, echo, double and triple articulations to provide proof of life, making sure we’re still alive.” The commissioned piece in 2021 was a response to Beth's score/text composed of a video of the Trondheims Fjord, alongside a blend of cello and voice recordings made in Chen’s home in Berlin during the pandemic lockdown period. The live rendition of the piece for ISSUE in March will be a deconstruction of these similar elements, primarily focusing on the amplified voice.
The archive is not neutral. At ISSUE, we strive to help artists expose and redress the historical record and structures of power relating to sex and gender. The ongoing With Womens Work Series aims to continuously activate and grow the accounts of women’s experiences and practices in the avant-garde canon, while honoring the legacy of artists who have built and contributed to it over the years.
Audrey Chen As a 2nd generation Taiwanese American living in Berlin, Audrey Chen`s work continuously explores the displacement of story and history due to the migration and integration processes, loss and adoption of language, untold stories, and how the past can be accessed through inherited and lived experience. Her practice is deeply intertwined with this act of invocation, calling upon the physical body to remember beyond the limitations of its own memory. Through extreme, un-processed hyperextensions of her voice in tandem with the chaotic glitch of a Ciat Lonbarde “Fourses” synthesiser, she invokes a highly amplified joint resonant body/space transforming itself in a feedback loop of imagination, touch, vibration, sound and aural sensation. For over two decades, she has been touring extensively, appearing worldwide and aside from her solo concerts, Chen performs currently in her longest running duo project since 2005 with Phil Minton; as BEAM SPLITTER with trombonist Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø; as MOPCUT with Lukas Koenig and Julien Desprez; with electronic music artist Kaffe Matthews; with American sound artist Nick Klein and as a duo for voice/live digital process with Mexican sound artist Hugo Esquinca.
Duncan Moore is an intermedia artist and musician from Baltimore, MD. He works primarily in the realm of abstract sound and movement and usually performs under the moniker Headband. He also plays traditional and free form music on the highland bagpipes based on the classical techniques of Piobaireachd, the original music of the highland pipes dating back to the 17th century.
Kiera Mulhern is a musician, poet, and psychoanalyst in formation based in New York. She works with text, voice, and other sounds. She is interested in not knowing what she’s doing.
Sydney Spann, originally from Baltimore, MD, is a musician based in New York. They work with synthesis, electronics, and voice to intervene within a personal archive of field recordings, culminating in studio compositions and live performances. Lately their work sublimates the latent aggressions of feminized labor into anxious and beautiful music. Previous releases include full length albums for Recital and Reading Group.
