Shelley Hirsch & Marcia Bassett

Saturday, December 15th, ISSUE commemorates the close of the 2018 season with a special year-end event featuring avant-garde industrial duo Wetware, as well as a rare collaborative performance between vocal artist, composer, and writer Shelley Hirsch & artist/musician Marcia Bassett. Cross-disciplinary artist and 2013 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence James Hoff DJs around the performances.

Shelley Hirsch and Marcia Bassett reprise their collaborative performance after a first meeting, brought together by Katherine Liberovskaya, at the monthly Abasement series earlier in 2018. A compelling amalgamation of Hirsch’s virtuosic command of extended vocal techniques with Bassett’s shimmering, dense, and often dissonant arrangements, the duo yields an expansive sound that weaves freely between their respective practices. Both artists are accomplished improvisers with extensive histories within NYC’s underground and downtown scenes, each contributing immensely to the development of new subversive sounds, styles, and positions within vocal and textural music. Together, Hirsch’s unique storytelling and free improvisation blends openly with the caustic textures of Bassett’s various tools and techniques.

Hailed as a “woman of a thousand voices” by The New York Times, Shelley Hirsch has been pushing boundaries for decades with her unique vocal art and performance work, drawing on her life experiences, her memory, and her vivid imagination. Hirsch’s mostly solo multimedia performances, compositions, improvisations, electronic music pieces, sound installations, collaborations and radio plays have have been produced and presented in concert halls, clubs, festivals, theaters, museums, galleries and on radio, film and television on five continents. Hirsch has performed hundreds of concerts of improvised music in NYC and internationally with a Who’s Who list of internationally renowned musicians including Anthony Coleman, Fred Frith, Phill Niblock, Billy Martin, Butch Morris, Ikue Mori, Christian Marclay, Michael Evans, Marcia Bassett, David Watson, Hans Tammen, Brian Chase, Sarah Bernstein, Kazuhisa Uchihashi (Japan/Berlin), Alexei Pliouisnine (St Petersburg Russia); Baba Sissiko (Mali Africa) Joke Lanz (Switzerland/Berlin); Koch/Schuetz/Studer (Switzerland) and with the live projected video of Ursula Scherrer and Katherine Liberovskaya. In 2018, The Fales Library at NYU acquired decades of her work to be archived for their Downtown Collection; and, Hirsch became an artist-in-residence at QueensLab in Ridgewood where she will be exploring ways to perform her text in ways she has never done before. She is also the 2017 recipient of a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts fellowship and remains both internationally renowned as an essential figure of New York’s avant-garde downtown scene.

Marcia Bassett works in areas of sound, improvisation, live composition and visual creations. Equal parts trance and critique, her work threads the needle between the conceptual and the sensual, between ritual invocation and cold semiotic gaze. Bassett deftly wields philosophical systems to produce heady, experiential clouds; pushing through drones into provocative soundscapes – the intangible narratives of dreams. What seems clear one second can become perplexing the next. You need to lose yourself to find yourself, and Marcia Bassett’s music is a potent facilitator. As a co-founder of Philadelphia’s shambolic psychonauts un, tectonic drone pioneers Double Leopards and pysch-folk trio GHQ, Bassett is deeply entwined with the American noise underground, and has mapped regions still only dimly understood by subsequent sonic travellers. In the mid-2000s she joined Matthew Bower in Hototogisu, where her mastery of cacophonous eardrum shred reached monolithic proportions. She has been an active member of Andrew Lafkas’ large ensemble Alternate Models, and contributed to “Gen Ken’s Supergroup” performing at PS1 Solid Gold and Experimental Intermedia. Some collaborations include work with Helga Fassonaki, Margarida Garcia, Bridget Hayden, Samara Lubelski and Barry Weisblat. Recent solo and collaborative presentations of her work include “Interwoven” a site-specific installation and performance in collaboration with Ursula Scherrer at Interference 2018, Tunisia; “Survival Of Laments” a live improvisation with Margarida Garcia and Manuel Mota at Festival Oude Muziek 2018, Utrecht; "Transitory Freezing of Perpetual Motion" improvised sound performance with Jenny Graf and dancers at Here-10 Evenings Festival, Sweden; “Field Recording with Zaïmph”, BOMB Magazine and "Out of Line: Narcissister" live improvised sound interaction with the performance, High Line, NYC. Her latest Zaïmph solo release, ‘Rhizomatic Gaze’ is currently available through Drawing Room Records.