BEAM SPLITTER

Saturday, September 9th, at 8pm ET ISSUE celebrates its 20th Anniversary and Fall 2023 season at the First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn Heights. We host this special event with internationally renowned musician and composer Roscoe Mitchell, joined by composer/clarinetist and 2020 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence John McCowen. The evening also features a performance from BEAM SPLITTER, the duo project of 2008 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Audrey Chen plus Norwegian musician & sound artist Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø. 

This year marks the 20th Anniversary of ISSUE and will be celebrated with a series of commissioned programs, orbiting around our annual Gala and affiliated Benefit events. Opening the evening, ISSUE welcomes another past Artist-In-Residence, Audrey Chen, to perform with Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø. Having toured globally since 2015, BEAM SPLITTER have performed close to two hundred concerts, in a wide variety of rooms—from cellars to art spaces to festivals stages, bringing their own brand of closely amplified dialog which is as highly intimate as it is equal amounts raw and exposed. They join together their two individual voices into a distinct language that delves beyond the borders of the corporeal elements of un-processed voice and trombone. On their new release “SPLIT JAW” on Tripticks Tapes and recently on "Rough Tongue" on Corvo Records, the two have brought in the use of simple analogue electronics to offset their hyper extended physical play and have been pushing new territories with this augmented set up.

Featuring artists from across our history as well as new projects, ISSUE’s 20th Anniversary presents an opportunity to celebrate and support the organization as we continue an ambitious calendar of programming. Since its inception in 2003 under the vision of late Founder Suzanne Fiol, ISSUE has evolved from a small East Village garage, to a grain silo on the Gowanus Canal, to a project space in The Old American Can Factory, to now owning our 22 Boerum Place theater as an internationally-recognized leader for fostering experimental cross-disciplinary performance.

Across 20 years of programming, ISSUE has sustained a thriving Artists-In-Residence program, encouraging generations of NYC-based artists to take creative risks in reaching the next stage of their artistic development. ISSUE has also inaugurated the Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellowship, assisting emerging curators to realize ambitious new projects. The organization has bolstered close partnerships within NYC’s cultural ecology, collaborating with like minded nonprofits, galleries, theaters, and non-traditional spaces as we’ve embarked on a period of off-site programming. Bringing commissions, premieres, and rare performances to new contexts and spaces throughout NYC, ISSUE has doubled down on its commitment to artists whose work eludes convention. Join us in recognizing this important milestone in our history.

BEAM SPLITTER - Audrey Chen (US) and Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø (NO) - is a duo for amplified voice, trombone and analog electronics. BEAM SPLITTER have been touring globally since 2015, playing close to two hundred concerts in a wide variety of spaces and contexts, bringing their own brand of highly amplified dialog, which is as intimate as it is equal amounts raw and entirely exposed.The duo’s latest album "SPLIT JAW" was released on Nat Baldwin's Tripticks Tapes in 2023. This bite size format packs an entire universe of their crafted sputter, breath and glitch inside its forty-five minute magnetic tape loop. The album is one third introspective Berlin studio production and the rest, live from a splintering concert given at Wels Unlimited Festival in Austria, their last concert of 2022 where audience and the duo alike giving it their all center of room, split open like hollow bones head to clavicle, muscles twitching and air spewing, breaking ground and mending it with alien hums. Audrey Chen was an ISSUE Project Room Artist-In-Residence in 2008, performed in 2017 with Joan La Barbara & Miguel Frasconi as part of ISSUE's Alumni Collaborations and most recently, in May 2021, created a With Womens Work commission inspired by Beth Anderson's VALID FOR LIFE. BEAM SPLITTER have taken part in larger commissioned works at the Teatro Colon, Buenos Aires and largely conceptualized a theatrical adaptation of MEDEA in front of the Olympic Stadium in Kiev, Ukraine (for butoh dancers and musicians) produced by the Ukho Agency. Since 2020, Audrey and Henrik have been organizing DEDICATED PLAY, an ongoing concert series and collaborative artistic project, where they have invited a diverse array of artists from around the world, primarily from diasporic backgrounds. While spinning a thread through the larger story of migration across continents/oceans and establishing the concept of home in shared relationships, they are seeking to bring together the commonalities of these experiences and express this communication in sonic language and music. In the past two seasons, they have worked and recorded with: Mo’ong Pribadi, Hyunhye Seo, Elaine Mitchener, Mariam Rezaei, Pat Thomas & Orphy Robinson (Black top), Carla Boregas, Mauricio Takara, Mieko Suzuki, Pak Yan Lau, Eivind Lønning & Espen Reinersten (Streifenjunko), Hugo Esquinca and Yara Mekawei.