ISSUE & Harvestworks present a second showing of Michael Morley's Music for The Never Quartet + 2019 Harvestworks Resident artist Ursula Scherrer & Michael Schumacher premiering Exotica, a new piece that subverts the sonic and visual tropes of the city -- sirens, alarms, jackhammers, and more.
ISSUE & Harvestworks present acclaimed musician Michael Morley presenting Music for The Never Quartet + 2019 Harvestworks Resident artist Natacha Diels premiering Sad Music for Lonely People a series of works involving a step-by-step guide to using heavy machinery in healing rituals.
Rena Anakwe continues her residency with Fast Forward to Silence, an immersive sound and body collage that honors the air around us. Focusing on sequences shifting between the minute and the rigorous, the piece explores the duality that air possesses through a duet with Jonathan González + lighting from Kelley Shih.
2019 Artist-In-Residence Charmaine Lee premieres “Laminals II”, the second movement for a new long-form piece for solo voice. The evening also features a duo with Victoria highlighting their individual practices of physicality (of voice, body, and technology) in relation to performance and sound.
2019 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow Benedict Nguyen presents very peak summer solstice (vpss), featuring Fana Fraser, Jasmine Gibson, Annie Heath, and Sokunthary Svay. This is their second program in soft bodies in hard places, a platform of trans-disciplinary events circling planetary events over 2019.
ISSUE presents the debut NYC collaborative performance from Jennifer Walshe and San Francisco-based musician & composer Wobbly (Jon Leidecker). The artists perform solo & collaborative works ranging across their shared interest in the idiosyncrasies of digital sound and the outer reaches of online culture.
DeForrest Brown Jr. curates “Okonkwo Weeps In Exile,” a new rhythmic opera featuring producer Nicholas Dawson (Bookworms), drummer Donald Sturge Anthony Mckenzie II, poet and "enlightened educator" Rafael Sanchez, with text from Guerilla essayist His Triumphant Blackness: The Negro Subversive.
Philosopher and musician Henry Flynt performs Everlovin’ Game On, an evocation of his best-known work: You Are My Everlovin’. Featuring solo electric violin & pre-recorded tambura, the piece brings together disparate vernaculars: Southern blues, modal jazz, Appalachian fiddle & North Indian raga.
Red Bull Arts NY and ISSUE co-present two live audio-visual performances organized in response to Gretchen Bender’s unfinished work of media theater, which was to be entitled So Much Deathless, by post-industrial band Black Rain (with Philip Vanderhyden) & Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith (with Sean Hellfritsch).
Japanese quartet SAICOBAB gives their NYC debut, consisting of vocalist YoshimiO of Boredoms/OOIOO and instrumentalists Yoshida Daikiti and Motoyuki "Hama" Hamamoto. The evening also features Lizzi Bougatsos & Sadie Laksa’s I.U.D. project, embedding an eccentric dub modality into industrial music.
American musicians Jeff Witscher & Jack Callahan premiere new collaborative and solo work. Known for their discrete compositions and far-ranging work under various monikers, recently both have been using primary descriptors such as “Music Art” and “Sound Music” to re-assert the simplicity of their practices.
David Watson performs on the Great Highland Bagpipe and Scottish smallpipes in collaboration with renowned percussionist Tony Buck. Multidisciplinary artist Laura Ortman also presents new work for violin, incorporating over-rosining and heavy use of amplification in her scored and improvised works.