Friday, November 17th at 8pm, ISSUE in partnership with AvanTokyo is pleased to present a solo performance by legendary Fluxist artist Yasunao Tone at Brooklyn Music School in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Tone has a long and storied performance history with ISSUE, including performing with Tony Conrad and Talibam! as part of ISSUE’s 10th Anniversary series in 2013, and most recently premiering AI Deviation at ISSUE in 2016. The evening also features a duo presentation by experimental musicians Marcia Bassett & Bob Bellerue, working in improvised processes. Their live performances explore sonic states while incorporating guitar and piano soundboard in a blissful fury of feedback and resonance, as well as electronics and synths that explode into gnarled walls of sound.
Well known as an active member of the Fluxus movement since 1962, Yasunao Tone’s expansive practice eschews standard notions of media and embraces contradiction. His most recent sets, harsh and scrupulous digital noise generated by his own modifications to the MP3 encoding system, have been called, “chaotic and highly charged, cerebral in its conceptual intent but with a bracing sense of urgency” (Wall Street Journal). In 2016, at ISSUE’s 22 Boerum Pl. theater, Tone debuted AI Deviation in collaboration with Prof. Tony Myatt, University of Surrey UK, and a team of researchers including Mark Fell and Dr. Paul Modler. A series of performances using Tone’s MP3 Deviation software were captured in a laboratory, then used to train Kohoen Neural Networks to develop artificial intelligences that simulated several of his performance approaches. The AIs were integrated in a software framework and computer performance system that extracted attributes from the audio they generated to “listen” to the output and make performance actions as if they were virtual Tone performers. Five versions of Tone AI exist in the performance software, each of which exhibits certain responses modeled on those previously adopted. In performance Tone deviated and controlled AI versions of himself along with the mechanisms that each AI uses to hear and respond to the audio they generate, interacting live with AI versions of himself as performer. In the performance at Brooklyn Music School, Tone will present the latest modification of his AI Deviation.
Marcia Bassett and Bob Bellerue also have a long and intertwining history with the organization, each initially performing solo sets at The Old American Can Factory on the same evening in 2007, while also presenting a number of other projects throughout the years. They began playing together in 2015, recorded Endless Parabolas in the same year, and now perform together at ISSUE for the first time.
In Fall 2023, ISSUE Project Room celebrates its 20th Anniversary with a series of commissioned programs, orbiting around our annual Gala and affiliated Benefit events. ISSUE closes the 20th Anniversary celebration with end-of-year activities featuring longtime friends and collaborators of the organization at key partner venues.
ISSUE Project Room Members tickets are half price and members retain exclusive access to all limited-capacity events until sold out.
Yasunao Tone is a Japanese-American artist, writer, theorist, and composer. According to critic Alan Cummings, he is “part of a whole generation of post-war iconoclasts who followed in the wake of John Cage's discovery of indeterminacy, determined to shake music and art out of their enslavement to the high art, romanticist ideals of the 19th century.” He co-founded Group Ongaku (Music group) in the early 1960s, has been active in the Fluxus movement since 1962, and has also been an organizer and participant in many important music and performance scenes including New York’s Downtown improvisors, and the European electronica experimentalists. An outstanding experimentalist, Yasunao coined the term "paramedia art" to describe his work, and his artistic inventions include prepared CD and interventions with an MP3 system. Primarily a composer, Tone has worked in many media, creating pieces for electronics, computer systems, film, radio and television, as well as environmental art. His work is distinguished by conversion of text into music via images with analog and digital means, and with critique of medium in use (Music for 2CD Players, Solo for Wounded CD ). Tone has presented concerts at the Kitchen, MoMA, the Guggenheim, Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona, the Ars Electronica Festival, Centre George Pompidou, Sonic Lights in Amsterdam, ATP festivals and Lovebytes festivals, among many others. Select exhibitions include the Venice Biennale, numerous Fluxus shows, "The Japanese Avant-garde since 1945" at the Guggenheim Museum, "Bitstreams" at the Whitney Museum, the Yokohama Triennale. Honors include the Ars Electronica Golden Nica award and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts award in music. Tone has performed at ISSUE Project Room extensively, including multiple performances during ISSUE’s 10th Anniversary series: Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain, while also premiering AI Deviation, new work that embraced artificial intelligence.
Marcia Bassett and Bob Bellerue are sound artists and experimental musicians currently living in New York, who began collaborating in 2015. Marcia Bassett is a NYC-based musician and artist known for her innovative and unconventional approach to music. Exploring the realms of sound collage, improvisation, and immersive audio-visual environments, Bassett’s work delves into the cultural world and immediate surroundings, encountering various phenomena that have the potential to be transformative within ourselves and our environment. Her artistic vision is to create a heady sonic interplay of otherworldly narratives that blend elements of trance and critique. Bob Bellerue is a sound artist, experimental musician, sound/video curator, and creative technician based in Ridgewood NY. Over the last 30+ years he has been involved in creating and presenting a wide range of sonic activities – experimental music, sound art, noise, junk metal percussion ensembles, soundtracks for dance/ theater/ video/ performance art, and sound / video installations. Bob’s electronic sound work is focused on resonant feedback systems, using amplified instruments, objects, recordings, and spaces, in combination with electronics and software written in the Supercollider audio synthesis programming language.
