LEE RANALDO & LEILA BORDREUIL

Friday, May 12th at 8pm, ISSUE is pleased to present the debut U.S. performance from Parisian guitarist Nina Garcia, who performs solo in advance of her guest appearance as a part of ISSUE’s staging of Leila Bordreuil & Luke Stewart’s Feedback Ensemble on May 18th. To mark the occasion, Leila Bordreuil & legendary guitarist Lee Ranaldo will open the evening, reprising their recent duo for an evening that transgresses boundaries between instrumental improvisation and noise, with singular approaches to their respective instruments. The performances will take place at Brooklyn Music School in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

Guitarist and founding member of Sonic Youth Lee Ranaldo and cellist, composer, and 2016 ISSUE Artist-in-Residence Leila Bordreuil presented a first-time collaboration with Stephan Moore that celebrated David Tudor’s Toneburst composition created for the 1975 Cunningham Dance Sounddance at ISSUE’s 2016 Gala. Since then, Ranaldo & Bordreuil have gone on to perform at ISSUE again in 2019, and have conducted a series of recording collaborations at ISSUE’s 22 Boerum theater. Both artists have far-ranging improvisational histories and approaches, and this evening marks the next step in their developing collaboration. 

Lee Ranaldo co-founded Sonic Youth in 1981, and has been active from New York for the past 40+ years, recording, performing, collaborating with numerous others, producing discs, exhibiting visual art and publishing volumes of poetry and journals. He has performed throughout the world, often with partner Leah Singer. His most recent album, In Virus Times, recorded during (and influenced by) the covid pandemic in autumn 2020. He was music producer for HBO’s VINYL series. His Hurricane Transcriptions (based on wind recordings made during Hurricane Sandy in NYC in 2013), originally written for Berlin’s Kaleidoscop String Ensemble, has recently been performed with Brooklyn’s Dither Electric Guitar Quartet and Yeahyeahyeah's percussionist Brian Chase. They are currently preparing recordings of the piece for release. Recent live performances with Singer, Contre Jour, have been large scale, multi projection sound+light events with suspended electric guitar phenomena that challenge the usual performer/audience relationship, often  via in-the-round staging. His 'Lost Highway' drawings have recently been shown at IKOB Museum, Belgium, and Karma Gallery Bookstore in NYC. 

Leila Bordreuil is a French-American cellist, composer, improviser and sound-artist based in Brooklyn. She accesses concepts as diverse as Noise, contemporary classical, free jazz, and experimental traditions but adheres to none of them. Her music mixes deep melancholia with cathartic harsh noise-walls, and was described by the New York Times as “steadily scathing music, favoring long and corrosive atonalities.” Driven by a fierce interest in pure sound and inherent texture, Leila challenges conventional cello practice through extreme extended techniques and unorthodox amplification methods, to the extent she sometimes seems to be playing the P.A system rather than her cello. Her compositions frequently incorporate sound-spatialization by way of site-specific pieces and multichannel installations. Collaboration is central to Leila's musical practice; she has worked extensively with Sean Ali, Bookworms, Michael Foster, Vincent Jehanno, Kali Malone, Joanna Mattrey, Bill Nace (Body/Head), Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth), Zach Rowden (Tongue Depressor), Julia Santoli, Tamio Shiraishi (Fushitutsa) and Luke Stewart. She is a Jerome Foundation Artist Fellow (2021-23) and was a 2022 commissioned composer and artist-in-residence at the GRM, Paris. She regularly tours in Europe and the US, performing at prestigious concert halls and punk houses alike.