Formed in NYC in 1993, the improvising collective No-Neck Blues Band (NNCK) favors anonymity, autonomy, and obfuscation. Alongside founding member Keith Connolly (2016 AIR), they return to open ISSUE’s Fall season at First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn.
ISSUE presents the first commission from Eden Girma (2026 AIR). Part dreamscape and part summoning circle, an intimate diasporic familial archive is pieced together through the eyes of a five-year-old child.
In partnership with Franklin Furnace as part of their 50th anniversary commemoration and November release of "Back to the Present: 50 Years of Free Expression with Franklin Furnace" ISSUE presents an evening of performance and conversation.
Incorporating elements of noise, trance and minimalism, Sergei Tcherepnin (2012 AIR) presents new work for Serge Modular synthesizer.
In honor of Tony Conrad, Los Angeles based filmmaker, photographer, and documentarian Tyler Hubby has been invited by ISSUE to share selections from his archive featuring many never-before-seen performance and interview videos, including three ISSUE Project Room performances.
The Whitney Museum of American Art, in collaboration with ISSUE Project Room, is proud to present the opening night of Cecil Taylor's retrospective and festival. Renowned musician Cecil Taylor is joined by two longstanding collaborators, Tony Oxley and Min Tanaka.
Saturday, April 9th at The Emily Harvey Foundation, ISSUE Project Room presents Dawn Kasper’s WISH WANT WISH, a new improvisational performance composition evoking historical references to the philosophy of desire.
Storied improviser Eugene Chadbourne is a leading voice in the American underground, developing new practices in avant song, instrument building, and music distribution since the early 1970s. In two solo sets, he excavates a broad catalog of works important to his musical development and buried in collected memory.
Japanese artists Takahiro Kawaguchi and Makoto Oshiro use homemade devices and everyday objects to create sounds with discrete relationships to performance spaces. Kawaguchi performs with handmade acoustic horns and small objects, Oshiro improvises with diverse materials including electronics and household products.
Active since the 1960s, Japanese sound artist Akio Suzuki's intensive involvement with the phenomena of pulse and echo led him to develop his own instruments, many of which employ quotidian and modest objects. In this acoustic solo performance, he reprises four pieces from his late 70s series "Conceptual Soundwork".
Artists-In-Residence 2015
Williams' final residency presentation is a collaborative textile, video, sonic, and linguistic work that centers on the intersections between a screen and its projection and on the unseen gestures that vanish into the surface of images they create.
Cellist Okkyung Lee and trumpeter Amir ElSaffar are distinguished instrumentalists with formidable reputations for their exploratory performance techniques and genre-blurring approach to musical styles. This acoustic performance features Lee and ElSaffar each performing solo sets, and in their first collaborative duo.