ROCKET SCIENCE (PETER EVANS, IKUE MORI, SAM PLUTA, CRAIG TABORN)

Friday, July 7th at 8pm, ISSUE is pleased to present a rare performance from Rocket Science, a collaborative improvising ensemble formed in 2012. Initially composed of Evan Parker, Peter Evans, Sam Pluta, and Craig Taborn, the group has expanded on occasion to include Ikue Mori on live electronics. Rocket Science released a critically acclaimed eponymous album on More is More Records in 2013 and has appeared at festivals such as Big Ears, Moers, and Guelph.  The performance will take place at Brooklyn Music School in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

Each member of Rocket Science have long standing performance histories with ISSUE: Evans - a 2014 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence - performed most recently with Joe McPhee in 2016, Mori with David Watson in 2021 and alongside 2019 Artist-In-Residence Charmaine Lee, Pluta with work premiered by Yarn/Wire, and Taborn with Kris Davis as a part of ISSUE’s Syncretics Series. 

In Fall 2023, ISSUE Project Room celebrates its 20 year anniversary with a series of commissioned programs, orbiting around our annual Gala and affiliated Benefit events. ISSUE begins the 20th anniversary celebration with July activities featuring long-time friends and collaborators of the organization at key partner venues.

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.

Peter Evans is a composer, trumpet player, improvisor and bandleader based in New York City since 2003.  Evans is part of a broad, hybridized scene of musical experimentation, and his work cuts across a wide range of modern musical practices and traditions.  Peter is committed to the simultaneously self-determining and collaborative nature of musical improvisation as a compositional tool, and works with an ever-expanding group of musicians and composers in the creation of new music. He leads and composes for several different ensembles, primarily Being & Becoming (with Joel Ross, Nick Jozwiak and Michael Ode) and SYMPHONY (with Alice Teyssier, Jozwiak and Levy Lorenzo). He leads the improvisational trio Forever 21 with virtuosi Andy Berman (guitar) and Michael Ode (drums). As well as collaborative projects such as his duo with Elias Stemeseder and Pulverize the Sound (with Mike Pride and Tim Dahl), Evans continues to work in a variety of new formations, exploring through-composed music, group improvisation, arranging, and electronic music. In addition to touring and presenting his groups internationally since 2007, Evans has been exploring solo trumpet music since 2002 and is widely recognized as a leading voice in the field, having released 7 albums of solo music since 2006, including the critically claimed “More is More” and “Lifeblood”. He has performed solo concerts in the USA, Europe, Asia, and South America. As a composer, Evans has been commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Wet Ink, Yarn/Wire, the Donaueschingen Musiktage Festival, the Jerome Foundation's Emerging Artist Program, and the Doris Duke Foundation. Evans has presented and/or performed his works at major festivals worldwide. He has composed works for his own ensembles, soloists, chamber ensembles, and choir. In 2022 Evans was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition. As an educator, Evans has given masterclasses and conducted workshops on improvisation, composition, instrumental practice and creativity at the Juilliard School, Manhattan School of Music, the New School of Social Research, Royal Academy of Music, Trinity College of Music, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Hochschule für Musik Köln, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, Institute of Sonology, Melbourne University, UC San Diego, UC Irvine, University of Toronto, University of Oregon, Cornish College, Oberlin Conservatory, and Cleveland Institute of Music. Between 2019 and 2022 Evans conducted a series of performance-centered workshops with young musicians in Lisbon, Portugal, a series called Som Crescente. In 2020 he received a grant from the US Embassy in Lisbon to further develop this series, expanding this work to students in the Azores. Evans has worked with some of the leading figures in contemporary music: John Zorn, Pauline Oliveros, Brian Ferneyhough, Kanye West, George Lewis, Anthony Braxton, Mary Halvorson, Craig Taborn, Ambrose Akinmusere, Lydia Lunch, Weasel Walter, George Benjamin, Dave Liebman, Ingrid Laubrock, Jeff "Tain" Watts, Tyshawn Sorey, Ikue Mori, Steve Schick, and others As an interpreter of notated concert music, Evans has performed works by Varese, Xenakis, J.S. Bach, Stravinsky, Elliott Carter, Marcos Balter, Julio Estrada, Agusta Read Thomas, Wagner, Ligeti, and many more.Peter Evans has been releasing recordings on his own label, More is More, since 2011 beginning with his quintet's critically acclaimed album "Ghosts". MIM has 20 releases as of 2023. 

Ikue Mori was born in Tokyo, Japan, and moved to New York in the late 1970s. Her additional recordings include Painted Desert (1997), One Hundred Aspects of the Moon (2000), In Light of Shadows (2015), Highsmith (2017), and Archipelago X (2021). She has composed soundtracks for filmmakers, received numerous commissions, and led workshops at institutions such as the New School, Stanford University, Dartmouth College, the New Music Conservatory at Mills College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the University of Gothenburg. Mori performs in venues such as Roulette, The Stone, and Park Avenue Armory in New York City and at international festivals. Ikue Mori is an electronic musician expanding the range of sonic and technical possibilities for experimental and improvisational music. She creates rhythmic and ambient soundscapes using digital processing techniques, a laptop computer, and repurposed elements of electronic drumming equipment. Over her five-decade career, Mori has transformed the use of percussion in improvised music and inspired generations of electronic musicians. Originally a drummer with the seminal no wave band DNA, Mori’s early work featured driving rhythms influenced by Japanese taiko drumming. She soon moved from acoustic percussion to digital performance. She first adopted drumming machines (programmable electronic devices that generate percussive rhythms) that gave her the ability to improvise and to mix live and prerecorded sequences. As the processing capacity of laptop computers increased, Mori began using them almost exclusively. Laptops enabled more expansive pattern sampling, and they allowed her to incorporate visual elements, including animation, into her work. Mori's compositions are characterized by looping patterns and layers of digital sound fragments. By randomizing the pitch or intensity of the onset and endings of looping patterns, she injects variability into improvised performances. The resulting collection of electronic sounds and clicks (or electronic glitches) that make up her meandering loops lends texture and color to her music, ranging from the ethereal to the jarring and surreal. Mori is a prolific and sought-after collaborator, and she has recorded and performed with artists and improvisers from a range of musical genres. Beyond her solo recordings, she has recorded or performed with Dave Douglas, Butch Morris, Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, and many others, including as Hemophiliac, a trio with John Zorn and singer Mike Patton, as well as being a member of Zorn's Electric Masada. With Zeena Parkins, she records and tours as duo project Phantom Orchard. She often records on Tzadik, as well as designing the covers for many of their albums. Mori has drawn inspiration from visual arts. Her 2000 release, One Hundred Aspects of the Moon was inspired by famed Japanese artist Yoshitoshi. Her 2005 recording, Myrninerest, is inspired by outsider artist Madge Gill. In 2022 Mori received the MacArthur Fellowship award. 

Sam Pluta is a Baltimore-based composer, laptop improviser, electronics performer, and sound artist. Though his work has a wide breadth, his central focus is on using the laptop as a performance instrument capable of sharing the stage with groups ranging from new music ensembles to world-class improvisers. By creating unique interactions of electronics, instruments, and sonic spaces, Pluta's vibrant musical universe fuses the traditionally separate sound worlds of acoustic instruments and electronics, creating sonic spaces which envelop the audience and resulting in a music focused on visceral interaction of instrumental performers with reactive computerized sound worlds. As a composer of instrumental music, Sam has written works for Wet Ink Ensemble, the New York Philharmonic, International Contemporary Ensemble, the Warsaw Autumn Festival, Yarn/Wire, Timetable Percussion, Mivos Quartet, Spektral Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Mantra Percussion, TAK, Rage Thormbones, and Prism Saxophone Quartet. His compositions range from solo instrumental works to pieces for ensemble with electronics to compositions for large ensemble and orchestra. In addition to acoustic and electro-acoustic works, Pluta has written extensive solo electronic repertoire ranging from multi-channel acousmatic compositions to solo laptop works with video to laptop ensemble compositions for up to 15 players. Sam is the Technical Director for the Wet Ink Ensemble, a group for whom he is a member composer as well as principal electronics performer. As a performer of chamber music with Wet Ink and other groups, in addition to his own works, Sam has performed and premiered works by Peter Ablinger, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Katharina Rosenberger, George Lewis, Ben Hackbarth, Alvin Lucier, Chiyoko Szlavnics, Alex Mincek, Kate Soper, and Eric Wubbels among others. As an improviser, Sam has collaborated with some of the finest creative musicians in the world, including Peter Evans, Evan Parker, Ikue Mori, Craig Taborn, Ingrid Laubrock, Anne La Berge, and George Lewis. Sam is a member of multiple improvisation-based ensembles, the jazz influenced Peter Evans Ensemble, the free improvisation-based Rocket Science (with Evan Parker, Craig Taborn and Peter Evans), the analog synth and laptop duo exclusiveOr (with Jeff Snyder), and his longstanding duo with Peter Evans. Sam has also performed with the Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble. With these various groups he has toured Europe and America and performed at major festivals and venues, such as the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland, the Moers and Donaueshingen Festivals in Germany, Bimhuis in Amsterdam, and The Vortex in London. Dr. Pluta studied composition and electronic music at Columbia University, where he received his DMA in 2012. He received Masters degrees from the University of Birmingham in the UK and the University of Texas at Austin, and completed his undergraduate work at Santa Clara University. His principal teachers include George Lewis, Brad Garton, Tristan Murail, Fabien Levy, Scott Wilson, Jonty Harrison, Russell Pinkston, Lynn Shurtleff, and Bruce Pennycook. Sam is Associate Professor of Computer Music and Music Engineering Technology at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, where he directs the Peabody Computer Music Studios. From 2011-15 he directed the Electronic Music Studio at Manhattan School of Music and from 2015-2020 he directed the CHIME Studio at the University of Chicago. For 16 years he taught composition, musicianship, electronic music, and an assortment of specialty courses at the Walden School, where he also served as Director of Electronic Music and Academic Dean. He now teaches at the Walden School Creative Musicians Retreat, a summer program for adult sonic artists.

Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Craig Taborn has been performing piano and electronic music in the jazz, improvisational, and creative music scene for over twenty five years. He has experience composing for and performing in a wide variety of situations including jazz, new music, electronic, rock, noise and avant garde contexts. Taborn has played and recorded with many luminaries in the fields of jazz, improvised, new music and electronic music including Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, Lester Bowie, Dave Holland, Tim Berne, John Zorn, Evan Parker, Steve Coleman, David Torn, Chris Potter, William Parker, Vijay Iyer, Kris Davis, Nicole Mitchell, Susie Ibarra, Ikue Mori, Carl Craig, Dave Douglas, Meat Beat Manifesto, Dan Weiss, Chris Lightcap, Gerald Cleaver, and Rudresh Manhathappa. Taborn is currently occupied creating and performing music for solo piano performance (Avenging Angel), piano trio (Craig Taborn Trio), an electronic project (Junk Magic), the Daylight Ghosts Quartet, a piano/drums/electronics duo with Dave King (Heroic Enthusiasts) and a new trio with Tomeka Reid and Ches Smith as well as piano duo collaborations with Vijay Iyer (The Transitory Poems), Kris Davis (Octopus) and Cory Smythe. He is also a member of the instrumental electronic art-pop group Golden Valley is Now and performs frequently on solo electronics. His conceptual work 60 x Sixty is now available worldwide, for free at 60xSixty.com Craig lives in Brooklyn.