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Fairer Than Tongue is partly inspired by the grotesquely humorous painting of the beating of Saint Anthony of Padua and its correlation to the imprisonment and torture of the Pedro Albizu Campos (Leader of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Movement) by the US Government. Technically, Lopez employs compositional cells of traditional notation and text to aid in developing and shaping the piece.

ISSUE presents a duo performance between Brandon Lopez and celebrated Detroit-born jazz drummer Gerald Cleaver, a close collaborator of Lopez’s in numerous configurations (including distinct trios with Andria Nicodemou, Nate Wooley, Keir Neuringer, as well as in various large ensemble formats).

Applying various performative strategies on a case-by-case basis, Gabi Losoncy presents a small, unamplified "playing" of something. Losoncy’s recent works include HH (the final release on Graham Lambkin’s KYE imprint), an LP described as “two sides of psychologically dense nothingness,” and Security Besides Love released on Recital, an account voyeuristically documenting the artist’s life, work, and habitats.

ISSUE commemorates the close of the 2017 season with a special year-end event with acclaimed composer and electronic musician Tyondai Braxton and extended technique vocalist, composer, and performer Like A Villain (Holland Andrews), co-presented with BOMB Magazine.

Saturday, December 2nd, Byron Westbrook premieres Interval/Forum, his third and final piece as a 2017 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence. The work completes a series of conceptual environments that collaborate with audience perception and participation, making use of the theatrical setting of Irondale Arts Center to focus and expand the perception of audience presence as a dynamic performance element.

Alvin Lucier stages his paradigmatic 1970 work I am sitting in a room. The piece consists of several sentences of recorded speech simultaneously played back into a room where they are re-recorded sequentially. As the repetitive sequence continues, those sounds and resonances common to the original spoken statement and those implied by the structural dimensions of the room are reinforced. The others are gradually eliminated.

Alvin Lucier stages his seminal 1976 work Bird and Person Dyning, reprising a performance done at ISSUE in 2013 on a program that included the premiere of December 12th, performed by the Ensemble Pamplemousse. Bird and Person Dyning stands as an essential work demonstrating the composer turning inward to the fundamental sparks of aural phenomena.

In tribute and commemoration of the artistic contributions of Ana-Maria Avram, ISSUE presents a “tombeau” program celebrating late Romanian composer. Bassist and Hyperion Ensemble member Zach Rowden performs a stunning rendition of "Axe VII."

OCCAM IX, the ninth composition in the OCCAM OCEAN composition cycle, was created with Laetitia Sonami on electronics with her new instrument, the Spring Spyre. The work mode is based on an individual “image” illustrated and evoked within each solo -- where each musician is guided by his or her personal “image.”

Annea Lockwood’s 1995 composition I Give You Back, performed by Kristin Norderval, is a lament for unaccompanied mezzo-soprano and is set to a text by celebrated Mvskoke poet Joy Harjo. The score notes evoke the piece as “the simple image of one woman onstage, barefoot, letting loose great octave leaps and glissandos peaking in sharp cries, projecting a beautifully unfettered freedom.”

Stem-Flower-Root, the title of Michael Pisaro’s commissioned work for trumpet and sine waves, provides an apt metaphor for the FOR/WITH series at-large. Wooley describes how each of the composers featured have something in common with the structure outlined in Stem-Flower-Root; they demonstrate a power and creativity that can remain hidden, yet essential, in the structure of their works.

Ashley Fure’s Shiver Lung 2, performed by percussionist Ross Karre, features Fure’s signature use of complex timbres drawn from extended instrumental techniques and acoustic “wildness.” Her work is known for how virtuosity and crudeness “face-off,” circling an aesthetic region between embellishment and fact, between sound as a carrier of aesthetic intent and sound as a subsidiary effect of action.

Issue presents the debut duo performance between Christian Wolff (small percussion) and Michael Pisaro (electric guitar).

Christian Wolff’s For Trumpet Player was the first piece Nate Wooley received after undertaking the commissioning series. Wooley describes the impetus of commissioning these works as coming from a desire to add music to the solo trumpet repertoire that met a certain aesthetic that felt lacking in the contemporary literature: music with an attention to non-linear forms, an attention to sound and timbre over technical flash, and music that was personal not only within the language of the composer but the player as well.