Video

ISSUE presents the NY premiere of Always Already a new commissioned work by Ben Vida performed by renowned quartet Yarn/Wire, vocalist Nina Dante, and Vida himself. The evening also features the ISSUE debut of composer Aaron David Ross (ADR), presenting new compositions from his unreleased Filter Failure.

Curatorial Fellow Leyya Tawil presents her first program in the NOMADIC SIGNALS series, featuring the NYC debuts of music & performance outlet Porest & feminist noise reggaeton duo Las Sucias. NOMADIC SIGNALS is a vessel for sonic performance operating in what Tawil refers to as the “diasporic imaginary."

ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Holland Andrews presents Onè, a long-form vocal & clarinet performance focused on ancestral trauma, cathartic experience, and, ultimately, healing. With emotionality at the core of their compositional style, Andrews is known for expansive works which create massive cathedrals of sound.

2020 Artist-In-Residence Justin Allen rehearses with S*an D. Henry-Smith for their work "Guitar," originally slated to be performed at ISSUE's 22 Boerum theater on March 19th, 2020. The performance is postponed.

John McCowen presents compositions for solo contrabass clarinet for his inaugural performance as an Artist-In-Residence. These works present the concept of the instrument as an acoustic synthesizer. By sustaining multiple sounds simultaneously, the clarinet becomes a harmonic tube where sounds create beating harmonics.

Self-taught and independent in its vision and approach, Just The Right Height is an investigation of pop lyricism and idiosyncratic songwriting. Focusing on rhythm stripped of melody, repetition, detailed arrangements, and unique sound sources as her dominant compositional techniques, Hunt intersperses her catalogue with heartfelt, melodic tracks.

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

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.”

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.

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

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 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."

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.