Alessandra Novaga & Loren Connors

Saturday, January 22nd, ISSUE is thrilled to open its 2022 season with an expansive program featuring legendary artists Kim Gordon & Loren Connors reprising their duo that debuted at ISSUE, Connors performing alongside Italian guitarist Alessandra Novaga, and a solo set from underground multidisciplinary artist Dreamcrusher. The performances will take place at the First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn Heights.

Kim Gordon has been an undeniable force of independent music for almost four decades. In addition to serving as founding member, vocalist, instrumentalist, and songwriter for the highly-acclaimed alternative rock band Sonic Youth, Gordon has gained widespread renown as a visual artist, record producer, video director, fashion designer, and actress. She has worked with a wide range of collaborators including Ikue Mori, Lydia Lunch, Yoko Ono, Raymond Pettibon, Courtney Love, Chris Corsano, and Bill Nace as the electric guitar duo Body/Head (who last appeared at ISSUE in 2013). Recent years have seen the release of Gordon’s writings on art and music, including Is It My Body?, Girl In A Band: A Memoir, and No Icon. For this performance, Gordon reprises her duo with Loren Connors which saw its first time performance at ISSUE in 2014. This performance was recently released as “at Issue,” a limited vinyl record and testimonial of this unique duet released by Alara Music. Connor’s distinct, expressive guitar playing has also evolved continuously over four decades. He outlines bare, instrumental miniatures and glowing electric guitar poems—always threaded with a compassion that has become the signature of his solo work. Connors has recently collaborated with Oren Ambarchi, Suzanne Langille, Aki Onda, and Isobell Sollenberger at ISSUE.

The evening also features the debut duo between Connors and Italian guitarist Alessandra Novaga. A leading figure within Italy’s thriving experimental and improvised music scene, Novaga has consistently released striking solo efforts (most recently I Should Have Been a Gardener in 2020), as well as equally noteworthy collaborations with Stefano Pilia, Paula Matthusen, Elliott Sharp, Sandro Mussida, Travis Just, and others. Her approach to the guitar veers from the trajectories of visceral emotiveness and textural extended techniques that have held sway over the instrument within avant-garde contexts over the last half century, instead deconstructing and rethinking its unique properties through applications of structure, resonance, space, and tone.

Multidisciplinary artist Dreamcrusher also performs, coming to ISSUE after a commissioned online collaboration with Dis Fig as a part of ISSUE’s Distant Pairs series during Fall, 2020. Often expressing dystopian visions through powerful sound, Dreamcrusher conjures a unique style of confrontational, revelatory, intense music. In the past year, they’ve recently released the albums Panopticon! and Another Country on influential New York label PTP, alongside a host of visceral live recordings.

With a career spanning nearly four decades, Kim Gordon is one of the most prolific and visionary artists working today. A co-founder of the legendary Sonic Youth, Gordon has performed all over the world, collaborating with many of music’s most exciting figures including the late Tony Conrad, Ikue Mori, Julie Cafritz and Stephen Malkmus. Most recently, Gordon has been hitting the road with Body/Head, her spellbinding partnership with artist and musician Bill Nace. Despite the exhaustive nature of her résumé, the most reliable aspect of Gordon’s music may be its resistance to formula. Songs discover themselves as they unspool, each one performing a test of the medium’s possibilities and limits. Her command is astonishing, but Gordon’s artistic curiosity remains the guiding force behind her music. A reluctant icon in at least three worlds—music, visual art, and fashion—Gordon was the undisputed “art star queen of New York cool” (The New York Times) for almost four decades before she moved to Los Angeles and started afresh with No Home Record, a debut solo album so dynamic and contemporary that it shocked and thrilled her multigenerational legion of fans. Borrowing its name from a Chantal Akerman film, No Home Record is, in many ways, a return as much as it is a departure. When Gordon first began playing music in the early 1980s, she used a guitar, a drum machine, and some lyrics sniped from magazine advertisement copy. No Home Record contains echoes of that setup, in both form and concept, a revelation that nevertheless retains all the “wit and menace,” as The Guardian put it in a five-star review, that has distinguished Kim Gordon’s music from Sonic Youth to Body/Head and ever onward.

Loren Connors has improvised and composed original guitar music for over four decades. His music – which embraces the aesthetics of blues, Irish airs, blues-based rock and other genres while letting go of rigid forms – has been recorded on Family Vineyard, Northern Spy, Drag City, Recital, and other labels. Connors names abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko his most important influence, and has honed his aesthetic not only through music but also through experimentations in haiku and visual art. He has performed with Kim Gordon, Daniel Carter, Keiji Haino, John Fahey, Alan Licht, Tom Carter, Jandek, and others. Connors also has performed with an avant blues band called Haunted House, together with vocalist Suzanne Langille, guitarist Andrew Burnes and percussionist Neel Murgai. Masters of Cinema released the Carl Dreyer film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, featuring a soundtrack composed and performed by Loren Connors. In recent years, Connors has focused mostly on live recordings of extended blues abstractions, with occasional performances in a more avant blues rock vein from time to time through the Haunted House band and collaborations with other artists.

For two decades, Kansas-born multidisciplinary artist Luwayne Glass has been pushing the boundaries of noise, industrial music and performance under the Dreamcrusher moniker. The Dreamcrusher project is a personal, confrontational, concise and challenging series of works. Via their intersecting queer, Black American, non-binary (they/them pronouns) identities, they continue to distort rigid aesthetics of noise and genre with wry sensitivity and passion. In 2020, they released their most high-profile works to date, "Panopticon!" and "Another Country", both released on New York City's PTP imprint.

Alessandra Novaga is a Milan=based guitarist with a solid classical training completed at the Musikhochschule in Basel. After many years spent exclusively in the classical field, her artistic course made a turning point that led her to explore and attend only the territories of experimentation, composition and improvisation, thus redesigning her relationship with sound and performance. She started to work with an array of composers and artists such Paula Matthusen, Francesco Gagliardi, Sandro Mussida, and Travis Just, among the others, who wrote the scores for her first solo electric guitar album La Chambre Des Jeux Sonores, released in 2014 on the Italian avant-garde record label Setola di Maiale. Alongside her solo works, she performed with musicians Stefano Pilia, Elliott Sharp, Nicola Ratti, Andrea Centazzo, Massimo Falascone, Gianni Mimmo, and Patrizia Oliva, among others. As a composer for theatre shows, Alessandra scored and played on stage for Elena Russo Arman, Teatro dell’Elfo and for Phoebe Zeitgeist. She recently performed for the New York based group Object Collection in the show Look Out Shithead. Alessandra performed in Europe and in the United States at festivals such as Donaueschinger Musiktage, Himera Festivaali, Angelica, All Frontiers, Cafè OTO, as well as New York’s Transient Series, the Incubator Arts Project - Ontological Hysteric Theater, Zebulon, Silent Barn and Spectrum.