Ash Fure: Animal

Wednesday, September 3rd at 8pm, ISSUE Project Room launches the Fall 2025 season in its 22 Boerum Pl. home theater with a program that pushes the boundaries of movement, sound, and perception. The evening features Ash Fure’s ANIMAL—a visceral performance that fuses psychoacoustic impact with spatial choreography—and work by the new artist duo Aavar, Almost Someone Else, a collaborative exploration of presence, privacy, and the poetics of public space. 

Writing in Night After Night, critic Steve Smith has described ANIMAL as a piece that “combines [Fure’s] longstanding architectural approach to sound with a gestural choreography and light-soaked presentation inspired by the Berlin techno club Berghain.” Designed in collaboration with partner and architect Xavi Aguirre, ANIMAL centers on a physical structure: that of the 22 Boerum Pl. cathedral-like theater, and a sheet of polycarbonate suspended over an inverted subwoofer. The work taps into “animal intelligence” through intensely physical sonic material—sub-bass pulses, micro-rhythms, and white noise that engage the listener’s body as much as the ear. Originally staged as a “listening gym,” Fure’s performance encourages active bodily interaction, channeling the visceral tension and release of clubs in Berlin and Detroit. Her manipulation of spatial resonance defies expectation—reducing even the most brutal sounds to a near-whisper, before erupting again in unpredictable jets of rhythm and distortion. The result is both immersive and destabilizing: an ecstatic, embodied experience of sound.

Ash Fure’s full-bodied sonic experiences work on the senses in startling ways. Called “purely visceral” and “staggeringly original” by The New Yorker, Fure’s live performances and total installations mobilize the elemental force of sound, the social muscle of listening and our animal capacity to sense. Winner of a 2025 Creative Capital Grant, Fure has also received two Lincoln Center Emerging Artists Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rome Prize in Music Composition, a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Prize, an FCA Grant for Artists, a Fulbright Fellowship to France, a Stuttgart Composition Prize, a Darmstadt Kranichsteiner Musikpreis, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship from Columbia University. Fure holds a PhD in Music Composition from Harvard University, is Associate Professor of Sonic Arts at Dartmouth College and served as co-artistic director of The Industry LA from 2021-2024.