With Womens Work: Sydney Spann - Attached or Detached (partial disappearance)

Thursday, April 29th, at 8pm EST, ISSUE is pleased to stream Attached or Detached (partial disappearance), a new work by sound artist and musician Sydney Spann. The piece is part of the With Womens Work series, commissioning artists to interpret and respond to scores included in Womens Work, a magazine first edited and self-published in 1975 by Alison Knowles and Annea Lockwood.

Notes from Sydney Spann on Attached or Detached (partial disappearance):

Attached or Detached (partial disappearance) is a composition that responds to Sari Dienes’ poem-score, “Experiment.” The composition takes inspiration from the poem’s absurd abstraction of a pie recipe, as well as from Dienes’ ink rubbings. Comprised of abstracted field recordings collected on and around the Jersey Shore, where I work as a part-time live-in nanny, this piece can be thought of as a kind of aural rubbing.

Sydney Spann (b. 1994 Baltimore, MD) is a sound artist and musician based in New York. She works with synthesis, chance operations, recursive compositional processes and voice to intervene within a personal archive of field recordings, culminating in long form compositions and improvised performances. Her debut full-length album Trepanning was released with Ehse Records in 2015, and her second full-length Queen Sound was released with She Rocks! in 2019. She has performed at the High Zero Festival of Experimental Free Improvised Music, The Walters Art Museum, and in show spaces and galleries across the U.S. The first iteration of her site-specific composition titled “Sending up a Spiral of,” was aired on Montez Press Radio last May. She is interested in the multitude of private experiences that shape and contest public space, as well as in the wavering boundaries within childcare work.

Recorded live 29 Apr 2021

ISSUE Project Room's With Womens Work Series is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and a grant from The Howard Gilman Foundation for 2021 online artist commissions. ISSUE gratefully acknowledges additional 2021 Winter/Spring Season support from TD Charitable Foundation and Metabolic Studio (a direct charitable activity of the Annenberg Foundation).