Monarch Butterfly by rocío sánchez (2026 AIR) features Melissa Almaguer (tap dance and percussion) and Kenneth Jiménez (double bass). Together, the trio explores the elusive monarch’s migratory journey through sound and movement, with each instrument articulating distinct states of motion.
Isabella Thorpe-Woods presents "Envelop/e," her second program as ISSUE’s 2026 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow. Bringing together choreographers Jade Manns and Ella Dawn W-S for site-specific duets, they navigate presence and absence, repetition and rupture, and the tension between inherited geometries and shifting landscapes.
"Spiriting Off" is a new solo work by luthier Webb Crawford (2026 AIR) for electric guitar, tenor banjo, and five-string banjo.
ISSUE closes the summer season with the return of Matana Roberts (2009 AIR). Opening the evening, Ben Vida (2013 AIR) will perform music from his 2026 release, "Oblivion Seekers" with vocalist Sara Magenheimer.
As part of "The Sonic Unconscious" festival, ISSUE presents Yolande Harris's Scorescapes, a program including the pieces Tuning In / Spacing Out, a collaboration with Edward Shanken, Fishing for Sound, and S.W.A.M.P., with Kato Hideki, Jim Pugliese, and William Lang.
As part of The Sonic Unconscious, ISSUE presents two installations by Yolande Harris. Pink Noise uses sound recorded underwater. In Tropical Storm, sound and video recordings of a tropical storm evoke the multisensory experience of being immersed in a torrential downpour in a rainforest.
Chased around by the ghosts of a paved-over salt marsh and equipped with perverted botanists’ tools, voices of divination and herbal elixirs, explore the neighborhood of Gowanus on foot and onscreen. Gina Badger leads a field botany tour exploring the place of edible and medicinal weeds in ecologies of decolonization.
Irish composer Enda Bates' hexaphonic guitar is simply a standard electric guitar with a special pickup providing access to each individual string signal. This allows each string to be processed differently, and be routed to a different place in the room. This new work transforms his instrument sonically and spatially.
Esther Venrooy's works range from purely electronic composed music to improvised combinations of electronica with traditional instrumentation (piano, guqin, pipa and satsuma-biwa). Since 2006 she has created site-specific works, multimedia performances and installations. Joined by the anarchistic duo pygmy jerboa.
Haunted House, comprised of avant-blues guitarist Loren Connors, Suzanne Langille, Andrew Burnes and Neel Murgai reunite after a 10 year hiatus for a special performance. Joined by Che Chen and Robbie Lee, stoner-rock/goth lullaby songwriter Sondra Sun-Odeon, and Helena Espvall (of Espers).
Described as abstract analogue pointillism, ambiance for spaceports, or hypnotic echochamber pulsebeat, Frank Bretschneider’s detailed music is echoed by his visuals: perfectly translated realizations of the qualities found in music within visual phenomena. Belgian sound and visual artist Yannick Franck joins.
Littoral
The feminist reception and production of pornography has had a complicated and fascinating trajectory, a discourse of representation often bound by the logic of the male gaze. The Hole Picture brings together a selection of socio-sexual films and videos by artists Barbra Hammer, A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner.