Spencer Clark himself performs his Typhonian Highlife project’s newest record The World of Shells. Presented as three long-form medley-style works for double keyboard with projections, the performance is a live showcase of a work described as Clark’s “most pellucid and detailed.”
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Pacific City Sound Visions: Sea Urchin
Sea Urchin, Egyptian-Austrian artist Leila Hassan’s collaborative project with Francesco Cavaliere, performs in their American debut. Exploring a unique blend of poetry and dub music, their practice modulates sine waves, tapes, and electroacoustic devices.
Afrikan Sciences & Sassacyprigo
Emerging from a long lineage of musical structures born from the difficult social and political conditions of race relations, Afrikan Sciences uses electronic instruments as a medium for open-ended explorations of form and composition across the musical linguistic heritage of African-American music, while Sassacyprigo’s free-form dance stylings channel intuitive action and a continuous “soul survivalist” strength to live free.
Félicia Atkinson: The Candle (La Bougie)
ISSUE presents Parisian-born artist Félicia Atkinson presenting a brand new performance involving an imaginary dialogue between the poems of Francis Ponge (1899-1988) and texts of her own, in French and in English, accompanied by electronics, voice and piano.
Paul de Jong
Paul de Jong, cellist and co-founder of celebrated experimental duo the Books, performs his signature emotional acrobatics with the aid of cellos, or “what used to be cellos,” in addition to a bottomless library of exotic americana, absurdist sound and video snippets, mismatched costumes and hats, fake teeth and moustaches -- all purposefully over-formalized and under-rehearsed.
Jessica Pavone String Ensemble
Composer and performer Jessica Pavone presents new works with her string ensemble, consisting of Erica Dicker (violin), Angela Morris (violin), Joanna Mattrey (viola), and Pavone herself (viola). As both an instrumentalist and composer, Jessica Pavone has regularly and thematically explored tactile experience and the use of the body in her compositions and performances.
Queer Trash Presents: Brutal Measures (Lydia Lunch + Weasel Walter)
Brutal Measures is a collaboration between Lydia Lunch and Weasel Walter, two innovators of the most challenging, aggressive, and uncompromising nether regions of no wave, free jazz, electroacoustic composition, and spoken word.
Queer Trash Presents: Straight Panic
Straight Panic is the queer nihilist power electronics project of Thomas Boettner, formerly from Minneapolis, MN and now based in New Orleans, LA. Against assimilation, against ease, Straight Panic matches the intensity of queer rage and desire to richly layered sound, drawing on sources such as the writing of Dennis Cooper to the atrocities of the current “gay purge” in Chechneya.
Carl Stone, Ned Rothenberg, Ami Yamasaki
ISSUE presents an evening of overlapping improvisations between computer music pioneer Carl Stone, composer and performer Ned Rothenberg, and Tokyo-based vocalist and cross-media artist Ami Yamasaki.
Beatriz Ferreyra
ISSUE presents the debut U.S. performance of Argentine acousmatic composer Beatriz Ferreyra. Ferreyra began her composing career incidentally, having been exposed to the musical methods of Pierre Schaeffer and the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, shortly after moving from her native Argentina to Paris in the 1960s.
Eric Frye: Obfuscation Morphologies
Eric Frye follows his exceptional 2017 ISSUE performance with Obfuscation Morphologies, a work that Fernando Zalamea, professor at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, describes as “an outstanding concrete sheafification of sounds drawing on conceptual motivations coming from Charles Sanders Peirce's studies on nerve excitations."
Syncretics Series: Adam Tendler
Adam Tendler presents a selection of unique works chosen especially for ISSUE, performing a repertoire of works from David Lang, Elodie Lauten, Frances White, and Tom Johnson.
Olivia Block
Olivia Block performs a new multiple speaker composition, continuing an ongoing investigation into the properties of wind and its related sounds and symbolic themes. Using a microphone and her breath, small fans, and other small objects on its surface, Block creates aural patterns and “currents” in the room, processing and moving sounds live on her laptop.
Lea Bertucci: Metal Aether
Bertucci celebrates the release of Metal Aether, her second album on NNA Tapes (following 2017’s All That Is Solid Melts Into Air), by presenting recent works for alto saxophone and tape that appear on the record, as well as a new composition that is directly informed by the particular acoustic qualities of 22 Boerum Place.