Media 2018

Wetware thrives on unease, with Roxy Farman’s prowling, anxious vocalizations ranging from deadpan poetics to humming, whispering, and screeching. Matthew Morandi’s tense sound design -- at-once decidedly abstract and constantly visceral -- establishes a truly alien sonic backbone that exists at the edges of rhythm. The result is an uncompromising, dystopic sound -- like “street garbage caught in an updraft -- using both technology and the human voice and body to create a “devastating portrait of a society in peril.”

Shelley Hirsch and Marcia Bassett reprise their collaborative performance after a first meeting at the monthly Abasement series earlier in 2018. A compelling amalgamation of Hirsch’s virtuosic command of extended vocal techniques with Bassett’s shimmering, dense, and often dissonant arrangements, the duo yields an expansive sound that weaves freely between their respective practices.

Madison Greenstone is a contra/bass/clarinetist whose creative practices persistently question the boundaries between composer, performer, improviser and collaborator. Her musical making positions the nature of these less as nominators and more as predicates able to activate each other.

Julia Santoli premieres “Oneiric receiver (((night throat)))” with glockenspielist Trevor Saint, staged in a landscape of neon and steel made by multimedia artist Graciela Cassel. The work is a ballad of sleepwalking slippage, apparitions through the night.

Angel Marcloid's Fire-Toolz is a frenzied digital video collage and music project overflowing with genres: electro-industrial, harsh noise, trip metal, heavy dance, vaporwave, and more. Rendering the personal and digital inseparable, Fire-Toolz transforms decades of internet aesthetics into a lexicon of swirling iconography, where recurring symbols and sounds create a world of recursive transformation.

Her first-ever piece for trumpet, Annea Lockwood’s Becoming Air completely inhabits the concept of the FOR/WITH festival. It was composed through intimate collaboration with Wooley, using much of his improvising electro-acoustic vocabulary. And, yet, it is absolutely an Annea Lockwood composition: performative, shamanic, and with an attention to the naturalness of sound that makes the audience rethink their aural surroundings.

Malediction is a piece for four players (Michael Foster on Saxophones, Nina Dante voice, Lucie Vítková on accordion and objects, and Lopez on double bass). The piece seeks to be reliant on quiet and violent sounds and to create a space where the incidental is fostered.

Brandon Lopez performs solo selections from his album “Quoniam Facta Sum Villis,’ recently released on Austin, Texas-based label Astral Spirits. Created, in part, as an answer to the musical "reason" of Bach cello suites, Lopez seeks to create the inverse of what's hailed as musical logic -- creating something florid and beautiful from the violent and erratic and to deny the supremacy of the written in favor of the intuitive.

2008 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Ashley Paul performs alongside longtime mentor and renowned pianist-composer Anthony Coleman. Both artists debut collaborative reinterpretations of songs by Paul, including works from her new album Lost in Shadows, as well as new compositions from Coleman.

ISSUE is pleased to present the world premiere of Episodes et Mutations, an immersive performance and light installation exploring perceptual intersections between sound and light by cellist, composer, sound artist, and former ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Leila Bordreuil.

Claire Rousay is a Canadian-American improvisor, composer, and curator based in San Antonio, Texas. Drawn to improvisation by a desire to free their percussion practice from the constraints of conventional timekeeping, Rousay explores the emotional overlap of rhythm, speed, and texture as both a soloist and participant in creative partnerships that span the United States.