Media

ISSUE has a significant archive of performance documentation that represents both an important link to the past, and a future resource for artists and audiences. ISSUE’s public media archive is a consistently updated and freely accessible collection of video and audio documentation from recent and past ISSUE performances. Currently, ISSUE is in the process of digitizing historical documentation from its former homes at The Old American Can Factory and silo space in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Regular updates feature newly published materials within ISSUE’s constantly expanding performance history.

Christian Wolff: Edges of Exercise Performed by Nate Wooley, Christian Wolff, Michael Pisaro, and Kristin Norderval

ISSUE presents a performance of Christian Wolff’s Edges or Exercises featuring Nate Wooley (trumpet), Christian Wolff (small percussion and melodica), Michael Pisaro (electric guitar) and Kristin Nordeval (voice). In the liner notes for Wolff’s 10 Exercises, the American composer Frederic Rzewski describes the work as “not reproducing familiar forms, but revealing, behind these, life’s unpredictability. You could say it is political; improvisatory; concerned with collaborative, non-hierarchical forms of social organization; but you can’t really say what it is like (although John Cage came close when he said, after a performance of the Exercises in New York, that it was like the classical music of an unknown civilization).”

Jonas Mekas: I Had Nowhere To Go

Jonas Mekas speaks on his film Reminiszenzen aus Deutschland, 1971/1993 (edited 2012), never before screened in the U.S. (running time: 25 minutes). A non-chronological presentation of the filmmaker’s time in German forced labor camps and displaced person camps, the film details a story that begins in 1944 and goes on until 1949.

Byron Westbrook: Threshold Variations

Saturday, September 9th, Byron Westbrook continues his ISSUE residency with “Threshold Variations,” an immersive environment expanding on the techniques of “Interval/Habitat” presented at Westbrook’s previous residency commission in April, 2017. “Threshold Variations” revisits the experimental staging of “Interval/Habitat,” but focuses more directly on the synaesthetic play between light amplitude and sound volume in relation to the audience’s thresholds of perception.

William Basinski at First Unitarian

ISSUE Project Room's 2017 Fall season opens at the First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn Heights with celebrated composer and process-musician William Basinski. His most recent work A Shadow In Time is a eulogy to David Bowie that explores the two artists’ shared concern with how to make time, change, and death their own.

Bergsonist at First Unitarian

Brooklyn-based, Moroccan-born Selwa Abd uses the fictional character Bergsonist (derived from Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonism) as her musical guise. For this performance, she has written a sonic ode to the decaying Internet.

YATTA at First Unitarian

YATTA, the performative guise of Sierra Leonean-American musician Yatta Zoker, performs at ISSUE's 2017 fall season opening. Her recently released debut EP Spirit Said Yes!, reissued on NYC imprint PTP, mixes sounds inspired by shamanism, jazz, and drone toward meditative and unsettling ends.

Sadaf

Sadaf H Nava draws on global influences such as traditional middle eastern instrumentation and vocal technique, free jazz noise violin, deconstructed Dembow and Reggaeton beats, and digital hardcore tendencies, to develop and unconventional palette unraveling within a "post-dj era soap opera."

Toxic City Music: Evan Caminiti & Paul Clipson

New York artist Evan Caminiti and San-Francisco-based filmmaker Paul Clipson present an audiovisual collaboration drawing from Caminiti’s most recent album Toxic City Music (Dust Editions 2017) as well as Clipson’s recent 16mm impressions of the “charged metabolism” of city life.

James Fei, Kato Hideki, Sean Meehan

Thursday, June 15th, ISSUE presents the debut trio performance between Fei, Kato and and veteran NYC percussionist Sean Meehan.. Their practice is described by The Wire as “no casual knob twiddling -- [with] Kato’s sense of timing as dramatic as it was with Ikue Mori and Fred Frith in their storied trio group Death Ambient, and Fei approaching the business of making music with deadly earnestness.”

Peter Brötzmann & Heather Leigh Duo

ISSUE presents Peter Brötzmann and Heather Leigh -- two fearless musicians capable of extreme dynamics and subtleties. Together they bring countless decades of experience at the cutting edge of speed-of-thought improvisation and deep lyrical soul, furthering their work into an "unrelenting, caterwauling hate-bomb."

Ken Vandermark & Nate Wooley

ISSUE presents jazz leaders Ken Vandermark & Nate Wooley in duo performance, returning together to 22 Boerum for the first time since ISSUE’s 10 Years Alive On The Infinite Plane in 2013.

Ka Baird: Espylacopa (A Reversal in Three Acts)

For her ISSUE debut, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Ka Baird presents Espylacopa (A Reversal In Three Acts), an interdisciplinary collaborative work that incorporates organic and processed sounds, human voice, projected and ambient lighting with performance art, sculpture and movement.