

MATA presents its 27th annual MATA Festival, this year in partnership with ISSUE Project Room at the limited capacity 22 Boerum Pl. theater. Featuring four concerts across four nights, this year’s festival explores the concept of INTERGALACTIC INFINITY: Music Between Spaces.
ISSUE Project Room hosts a free limited engagement for up to 10 ISSUE Members with RSVP with Thomas Ankersmit on his artistic practice with the Serge Modular analog synthesizer, his main instrument since 2006.
ISSUE Project Room is honored to present a special recording session by composer, poet, and 2021 Artist-In-Residence JJJJJerome Ellis, joined by longtime collaborator S T A R R busby. This intimate event gives unique access to ISSUE Members and launches the 2025 summer membership campaign.
At 2pm, ISSUE hosts a free public town hall organized by sound conceptualist & 2009 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Matana Roberts–the first in a nationwide series of gatherings.
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.
Lindsay Packer premieres DEPTH OF FIELD, her first commissioned work as an ISSUE Artist-In-Residence. Collaborating with dancer and choreographer Melanie Maar, the artists use light, color, repetition, movement & the reverberations that emanate from their movements to define and redefine the space around them.