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By channelling the “ethos of being a medium for music while refraining from any attempt to extract praise,” Pheeroan akLaff imbues his work with ancient belief systems that address creativity as received rather than generated.

Saturday, April 21st ISSUE is pleased to present an evening with pioneering composer David Behrman in collaboration with fiddler, improviser, and composer Cleek Schrey. Together, the two perform newly-developing situations: re-worked pieces from the past, embedded Appalachian fiddle tunes, and new compositions.

Julia Santoli premieres two new works within a sculptural landscape: “spirit is matter” with saxophonist Tamio Shiraishi, and “the prisoners are becoming ambient” with electronic artist and PTP label-head Geng.

Berlin-based Italian sound artist Francesco Cavaliere presents one of his “audio stories” -- an invented mythological narrative surrounded by abstract electronic music, presented in Italian with english subtitles. After years of live performance and intense studio work, Francesco has developed a unique style using his voice and an incredible archive of homemade sound effects as his primary sound sources.

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.”

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.

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.

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, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.