Media 2019

ISSUE presents pioneering French composer Christine Groult's debut U.S. performance.

ISSUE welcomes pioneering French composer Beatriz Ferreyra , presenting new solo work.

ISSUE welcomes pioneering French composers Beatriz Ferreyra & Christine Groult, presenting collaborative work. Ferreyra and Groult have worked together on multiple performances and releases including Nahash, released in 2015 on the Parisian label trAce.

Beatriz Ferreyra presents an improvisation using a Revox tape recorder, augmented with an analog matrix and a synchronizer box with self-designed variable speed drives. Ferreyra describes the use of the magnetic tape as “very physical, it puts the movement of the body into a direct relationship with the sound that is shaped.”

The series closes with Sarah Hennies taking center stage herself to perform her piece Fleas (2017). The music here is made entirely from objects found at thrift stores and flea markets and will feature Greenberg, Roberts, Schoenbeck, and Wooley in a supporting role. In Hennies’s words, Fleas is “Not exactly music made from trash, but music made from objects of little monetary value that someone decided they didn’t want anymore. Objects usually tell you how to play them if you’ll allow it."

Her first-ever piece for trumpet, Sarah Hennies’s Monologue is a celebration of the trumpet as frustrating machinery, taking the tubing and valves as instruments in themselves activated, or not, by the player’s breath. In this sense, the work is a deconstruction of what it is to be a trumpet player, blowing into a machine in hopes of something meaningful coming out the other end.

The first evening of FOR/WITH concludes with the world premiere of a new work by Ryoko Akama. One of the younger generation of composers influenced by the wandelweiser group (of which Houben is a major figure), Akama’s work deals with the relationships between performer and space, sound and time, and how the visual becomes the aural.

Katherine Young’s work for trombone and electronics, Puddles and Crumbs, is performed by Weston Olencki, who collaborated closely with Young in the composition and electro-acoustic setting of the work.

Cellist/composer Leila Bordreuil and guitarist/composer Lee Ranaldo debut an improvised duet, and are then joined by sound artist Stephan Moore, presenting a new collaboration that embarks from their previous trio performance at ISSUE in 2016.

Asha Sheshadri presents work that involves the unpredictable observation of and response to a personal and political network of relays -- archival fields coexisting in entropy -- that operate within our collective worlds and imperfect memories.

The New York Review of Cocksucking was formed by Richard Kamerman & Michael Foster via Tinder and by way of Luxury Lounge, where after finally meeting at a noise show in someone's house they promptly decided to forgo all formalities associated with online dating and start a noise duo together instead. Writing for Jazz Right Now, critic Clifford Allen describes the duo as belonging “in a tradition somewhere between John Duncan and Alfred 23 Harth, a path that will continue to fascinate and upend and which is absolutely necessary in this darkly draconian age.”

Performed at ISSUE's 2019 Gala, OVER WATER is the debut performance between 2019 Artist-In-Residence Rena Anakwe alongside ISSUE Art Advisory Council member Elliott Sharp and media artist Janene Higgins.