Leila Bordreuil & Lee Ranaldo With Stephan Moore

Friday, November 1st, ISSUE presents an expansive gathering of NYC artists working across disciplines. Cellist/composer Leila Bordreuil and guitarist/composer Lee Ranaldo debut an improvised duet, and are then joined by sound artist Stephan Moore, presenting a new collaboration that embarks from their previous trio performance at ISSUE in 2016. Artist Asha Sheshadri stages a new iteration of her essayistic performance practice -- a hybrid process that commingles memory construction, questions of citation and translation, and lost or silenced histories and diasporas. The New York Review of Cocksucking, the ecstatic duo of Michael Foster and Richard Kamerman (members of 2018 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow Queer Trash), also perform.

At ISSUE's 2016 Gala, legendary guitarist Lee Ranaldo, 2016 ISSUE Artist-in-Residence Leila Bordreuil, and Artistic Advisory Council member Stephan Moore presented a first-time collaboration celebrating David Tudor's Untitled 1975/1994. Untitled was inspired by Tudor's Toneburst composition created for the 1975 Cunningham Dance Sounddance. In this November 1st program, Ranaldo & Bordreuil, both of whom often transgress boundaries between instrumental improvisation and noise, create an improvised soundscape before reprising their collaboration with Moore, who works with multi-channel sound systems. Stephan Moore is also known as being the mind behind ISSUE’s Floating Points speaker system, a custom-built 15 channel hemispherical speaker system developed for Suzanne Fiol at ISSUE’s previous home at the Old American Can Factory.

Leila Bordreuil is a Brooklyn-based cellist and composer working in the realm of improvisation, noise music, and sound art. She accesses concepts as diverse as jazz, contemporary classical, noise, and experimental traditions but adheres to none of them. Her work has been described by the NY 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 amplification methods. Her composed works draw from a similar aesthetic and frequently incorporate sound-spatialization by way of site-specific pieces and multichannel installations. Leila's collaborations are numerous and extremely diverse, and currently active projects include: a trio with Bill Nace and Tamio Shiraishi, a duo with sound artist Julia Santoli, a duo with bassist Zach Rowden, an improvised string trio with Sean Ali and Joanna Mattrey, and a duo with techno producer Nick Dawson (Bookworms).

Lee Ranaldo co-founded Sonic Youth in 1981, and has been active from New York for the past 35 years, recording, performing, collaborating with numerous others, producing discs, exhibiting visual art and publishing volumes of poetry and journals. He has performed with partner Leah Singer throughout the world. His recently completed new album, Electric Trim, is out for release. He is music producer for HBO’s VINYL series. His Hurricane Transcriptions (based on wind recordings made during Hurricane Sandy in NYC in 2012), originally written for Berlin’s Kaleidoscop String Ensemble, was recently reduced for performances with Brooklyn’s Dither Electric Guitar Quartet. 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 via in-the- round staging.

Stephan Moore is a sound artist, designer, composer, improviser, coder, teacher, and curator based in Chicago. His creative work manifests as electronic studio compositions, improvisational outbursts, sound installations, scores for collaborative performances, algorithmic compositions, interactive art, and sound designs for unusual circumstances. He is the curator of sound art for the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, organizing annual exhibitions since 2014. He is also the president of Isobel Audio LLC, which builds and sells his Hemisphere loudspeakers. He was the music coordinator and touring sound engineer of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (2004-10), and has worked with Pauline Oliveros, Anthony McCall, and Animal Collective, among many others. He is a senior lecturer in the Sound Arts and Industries program at Northwestern University.