Free Music Archive - ISSUE Project Room Blog

Sharp/Centazzo

2010-03-12T10:53:26-05:00

To kick off ISSUE’s Chamber Music Month, downtown regular Elliott Sharp brought himself and Italian-born conductor/composer/percussionist Andrea Centazzo out for a few excellent improvised sets. As one might expect, it’s all good—check out Centazzo’s three cymbal trees in the above picture. Although according to the Wikipedia Centazzo’s a “minimalist” composer he, like Sharp, never seems to fit into that box. What they do both take from Reich & Co., however, is a concern with the effect of repeated sound on the sound. What they don’t take is diatonic harmony and pure “process.”

That downtown improvisation departed in style and content from minimalism is nothing new. This music turns a fixed process into an arbitrary element, and in that it seems to break the mold. Any aesthetic element of minimalism that seeps in—repetition, strong rhythmic pulses, ebow drones—is arbitrary and bound to change, and seems in active discourse and even disagreement with its downtown friend.

In the very last improvisation (below) just a few minutes from the end, Centazzo begins to play repeating patterns on his hanging gongs (parts of a gamelan? I can’t quite tell—check the above picture) and the decay of the gongs never really meshes with the next attacks from his yarn mallets. For one, the yarn mallet does not cause the sound to instantly appear, but rather draws the sound out a split second later, by which point he’s already moved on to the next note. It’s like looking at a spinning wheel that looks like it’s beginning to spin backward, where no percussive hits really make it through—they’re coming too quickly—and instead the focus is not on the actual attack, but on the point at which the tone from the gong becomes audible as a tone.

This takes maybe a half-second, by which point Centazzo’s already made it just about through his loop. Additionally, this repetitive auxiliary percussion calls to mind a certain someone, but evokes no tonality or central pitch, or even mode. This is why I suggested gamelan; these non-equal-tempered tunings defamiliarize a very familiar percussion pattern (extra credit to anyone who transcribes and analyzes these pitches). This is important: as the attacks quieten, and as the mallet sounds soften, the inharmonic sounds take over, and draw ears in. The attacks melt together, like fondue. All important things become as one and the differences have disappeared.

Sharp’s playing is always enveloping, a virtuosic display meant not to impress, and a rarity of form and ethos among musicians. Too often, those with the technique compromise or use it to replace real content, because they can get away with it. But in this—in never seeking to impress, only to convey—Sharp is in a rare territory.

guilted by the sun

2010-03-08T10:59:48-05:00

As one of the grand finales for this year’s fantastic Unsound Festival (making it’s first appearance in NYC), the excellent Canadian experimental-drone-ambient-shoegazer-doom-metal duo Nadja -- Aidan Baker and Leah Buckareff – conjured an absolutely massive soundworld of near-impenetrable density at ISSUE. Nadja design jagged, skyscraping architectures out of scalding and charred streams of noise and distortion, abstracting gestures of drone and doom into complex, infinitely detailed structures of intense beauty. Amidst sprawling ambient landscapes that are at turns placid, quivering, frightening, and impassable, Baker and Buckareff erect looming, spiraling towers that jut, writhe, and twist into the boundless vertical dimension before culminating into screaming spires of searing energy. Be braced to emerge/escape in a collapsed crawl – drained, soaked, cleansed, and exorcised.

Fields of rising, falling sound

2010-03-05T16:01:50-05:00

David Daniell works in transparencies and onion-skin shapes, and recurring, overlapping tones. Daniell slices the layers of drone to create something optimistic and mobile. As he layers the sounds, each new sound changes somewhat the meaning of the ones that already exist, and these sounds cycle in and out so that the shapes are constantly shifting. Daniell interrupts these environments with loose, melancholy pickings, that evoke some kind of campfire in the forest, where the pulsing high pitches are a cicada choir.

Daniell’s work gives the impression of travelling through a universe of sound sources, so that they fade in and out with no perceivable order. It is not quite narrative, but a slow transition, building to a one-man guitar army with some clear connection to Daniell’s work as concertmaster for Rhys Chatham’s large-scale guitar performances.

Yet, the one-man performance, while similar sonically, is far removed from Chatham’s compositions. Daniell, in a feat that would be impossible with a guitar army, oscillates between the cosmic and the personal, effortlessly fusing orchestral power and scope with the intimacy of a solo performance.

This recording, from Daniell’s February 12 performance at ISSUE, was a part of the Unsound Festival, presented by the Polish Cultural Institute, among many others. Daniell’s recent Table of the Elements release, I IV V I, was a part of their Guitar Series, which is ongoing. All of his albums are available from his site, as well as from various other independent stores.

Crossed out your eyes

2010-03-01T15:45:00-05:00

When Pete Nolan sings as Spectre Folk, his voice goes through a clipped, disarming delay that turns all held notes into phased-out noises, and makes all consonants trail off and blend into the next word. His songs seem to have verses and choruses, or at least that's the assumption, until they spin off into other phrases that don't quite fit into the same boxes. Instead of moving along through verse, chorus, verse, these songs just seem to stay put, throwing verse after verse off a bridge to nowhere.

Last week, I put up Steve Gunn's set (from the same night) and claimed it was Pete Nolan's Spectre Folk. Now that our files are all in order and correctly labeled, both of their sets are available on the FMA for download. Steve Gunn's latest work, Boerum Palace, is available as of last November from Three Lobed Recordings. In addition, the revised version of last week's post is up (all the good things about the music intact).

All of Spectre Folk's tracks here on the FMA are from the recent LP Compass, blanket, lantern, mojo. The LP is put out by Arbitrary Signs (003), and is available for $12 at petenolan@hotmail.com or for complete download at www.othermusic.com. The attached music is from Spectre Folk's January 29, 2010, performance at ISSUE Project Room, and if it doesn't convince you to get the LP, then who knows what will.

A video for "Sat Around" is available here, and the Arbitrary Signs release notice (with a couple pre-reviews) is here.

Steve Gunn, adding

2010-03-01T15:45:24-05:00

Steve Gunn's playing shimmers like a raga-inspired blues, or maybe a blues-inspired raga. It seems like it's all plucked guitars, roots and open strings, and cymbals.

In this music, every beat is the same. There are moments, here and there, where it starts to feel like it settles into something like a simple rhythm, the threes and fours we're used to hearing. It doesn't take long, though, because Gunn turns it around again and the "accent" (or what we're used to hearing as an accent) is somewhere completely different. After this happens enough times, the mind just shuts off. There's no use trying to re-calibrate every five or ten seconds.

Or, properly, "that part" of the mind just shuts off: the part that likes to keep time. Not that likes time, but that likes to keep it, and package it, and remember it for later in more easily-digestible threes and fours. When that part acquiesces, there's an entire universe to be found–the universe that consists of addition, not multiplication—a universe that does not remember multiples.

Steve Gunn's latest work, Boerum Palace, is available as of last November from Three Lobed Recordings.

the collective consciousness

2010-02-20T17:29:25-05:00

This Friday (2/19/10), ISSUE’s first-ever Artist-in-Residence Collective returns for their second monthly concert. The ensemble consists of Shannon Fields, Laura Ortman, Matt Lavelle, Shelley Burgon, Ryan Sawyer, and Jon Natchez (long-time collaborators from their 10+ years of work together in the now-concluded Stars Like Fleas). For the second residency concert, Jon Natchez and Matt Lavelle will present works to be performed by the collective. Shelley Burgon and Ryan Sawyer will lead the ensemble on 3/26/10.

To get everyone amped for the second installment of the residency, Shannon Fields and Laura Ortman have shared the recordings from their fantastic first performance. I‘ve included all three compositions from the show in a mix included below.

A Valentine for Jack Rose

2010-02-12T00:45:20-05:00

This Valentine’s Day evening, a handful of our world’s most soulful guitarists will gather at ISSUE Project Room to pay loving tribute to the great Jack Rose, who passed away in December at the much too young age of 38. The lineup, comprised of those friends whom he inspired and who inspired him, includes the Black Twig Pickers (the group featured on Jack’s most recent album), Pelt (with whom Jack played on and off again from ’95 until his death), Steve Gunn, Tom Carter, Marcia Bassett, Michael Chapman, and Glenn Jones.

I have compiled a mix from the ever-astounding well of riches that is the FMA, featuring musicians set to take part in Sunday’s celebration of Jack Rose’s incredible music. The mix traverses equal territory in the lands of drone and Takoma-style virtuosity, both worlds in which Jack established a voice of deeply-felt originality and undeniable importance. The last work in the mix features Mr. Rose himself, performing live with Peter Walker -- a long-established member of a short lineage of finger-picking legends whose ranks Jack has undoubtedly joined.

unsound of mind

2010-02-08T13:44:24-05:00

Unsound Festival New York kicked off last Thursday evening (2/4) – marking the first incarnation of the innovative performance and lecture series outside its homeland of Poland. Founded in Kraków in 2003 by curator Mat Schulz, Unsound Festival explores the intersections between “electronic, experimental, independent, post-classical, and club music scenes.” After only four days time, the festival is already crowded with stunning highlights. I caught the opening night show at Lincoln Center featuring a terrific set from Finnish DJ/composer/drummer Vladislav Delay (whose Tummaa album was probably my fav release of 09) in collaboration with German video artist Lillevan. Still recovering (in a variety of ways) from a startlingly fresh sequence of programming at Le Poisson Rouge last night: performances of classical music touchstones Pictures at an Exhibition (Moussorgsky) and Bolero (Ravel) were followed by an absolutely resplendent, mind-blowing set of abstract electronic improvisations from the North American debut of the Moritz Von Oswald Trio, featuring surprise guests Francois K (!) and Carl Craig (!!). Levon Vincent closed the event with a blistering DJ set that carried on until the very early morning hours (I’m lame and only made it until about 3:30am…)

ISSUE Project Room will host two events in the festival this week. The “Electronic Bridge” program on Tuesday night (2/9) serves as the first in a thread of thematic shows under the Eastern Promise banner, seeking to highlight a number of important Eastern European artists generally underexposed in the U.S. The “Electronic Bridge” will feature a diverse array of experimental electronic music from Zavoloka (Ukraine) and Zenial (Poland), as well as a set from NY local Bora Yoon in collaboration with composer R. Luke DuBois on the live video tip. To whet appetites for what should be a fantastic show, I’ve compiled a dope little mix featuring works from the artists on the program.

Check here and here for more info on the two shows at ISSUE, and here for a full schedule of the rest of the festival.

The Necks (a two-night engagement)

2010-02-10T01:16:20-05:00

It’s not so much hearing things happen. It’s more like noticing that things have changed, and now it’s time to re-assess your surroundings. It’s not so much listening for individual motivic and textural changes. It’s more like looking at time-lapse photography. It’s not so much seeing it all happen sped up. It’s more like looking at each image for a full minute or two. It’s not so much like noticing the movement of forms in the photo. It’s more like noticing the movement of color and shadows, whether random or patterned.

As a direct consequence of stretching one moment into such a duration, the slightest changes become tectonic shifts.

The Necks’ music comes in pockets, in revolutions per second that sometimes are very slow, and other times are very fast. Still other times, slow moments are superimposed on percussion patterns approaching twenty Hertz, the lower range of audible frequency. Phantom sounds come from Chris Abrahams’ piano strings, or maybe from Lloyd Swanton’s bass bowing in the upper registers. They could also be coming from how Tony Buck drags a cymbal across another cymbal.

Tony Conrad's Microscope

2010-01-30T17:07:04-05:00

More from Tony's brain today: this one comes from the MIVOS Quartet's June 2009 performance at ISSUE that also featured Luke DuBois's string quartet "Hard Data." Tony Conrad's "Minor" takes a 31-pitch-to-the-octave scale (a step up from the usual twelve), and fairly common harmonies become unfamiliar.

The first chord sounds, then the second, in an angular harmonic move like something from late Wagner, and back to the first chord again. Or, wait, it sounds like a new chord now--the microtonal inflections giving each chord a different vector and acceleration, like looking at the same object at dusk instead of dawn.

The contentious history of the "minor" scale might have something to do with this. Harry Partch, whose influence trickled down through La Monte Young (and many, many others), used an "undertone" scale as well as an "overtone" scale. In this tuning, the composer would (essentially) multiply the base pitch by whole numbers for a major scale, and divide the base pitch for the minor scale. Young, on the other hand, just used the upper-reaches of the major scale (the multiples 6, 7, and 9) to form the minor triad: there were many more different conceptions of "minor" theorized in the 20th century alone, which is not to mention that the minor chord was the number one roadblock for just about every tuning theorist since "minor" came into being.

Tony Conrad uses these "minor" tunings and more to defamiliarize the scale as we know it. For this performance, the MIVOS Quartet detuned their instruments ("scordatura") so that they could play in the same hand positions to reach strange notes on mistuned strings. The performance resonates with the open strings, and feels less like moving through standard chromatic harmony than like looking through a microscope at a large object and trying to keep the whole thing in your head at once.

Secrets from the Storm

2010-01-25T22:48:49-05:00

As a little preview of Peg Simone's upcoming release, "Secrets From The Storm," we've got a live recording from her previous performance at ISSUE. First of all, there's the haunting drone/narrative pieces "Boilermakers" and its sequel "O Holy Night."

Simone also plays guitar in what might nearly be called ISSUE's unofficial house band (the favorite band of founder Suzanne Fiol), Jonathan Kane's February. So, as if these first two extended narratives were not enough, Kane joins her for the final track: their extended version of "When The Levee Breaks," (1927/Levee).

That same night, we had the strange sounds of Chicago-based sound artist J.R. Robinson--they sound a little bit like if you played a field recording of the jungle backward and added some guitar tracks. M.V. Carbon and Zach Layton finish out the mix, with lush pads that quickly turn angry.

under the color cave

2010-01-22T16:18:31-05:00

Refreshed from a set of November dates opening for the Jesus Lizard, Noveller graced ISSUE Project last Thursday with her first show of the New Year – the labors of which are shared below. Noveller serves as the solo vehicle for Brooklyn-based sound artist, visual artist, and filmmaker Sarah Lipstate, who has worked with a diverse array of musicians: playing in Cold Cave and Parts & Labor, performing in the ensembles of twin towers of Downtown guitar music Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham, and collaborating with Carlos Giffoni (whose No Fun Productions label put out her fantastic Red Rainbows album last year).

As Noveller, Ms. Lipstate sends beautifully constructed sheaths of complex colors drifting and swirling around elegant, crystalline loops of sparsely-picked guitar. In the performance of "Redgrave" (to be found on an upcoming 7” on FTAM), muted washes of shimmering chords float back and forth in slowed motions, framed by narrow streams of translucent sound that glide through the upper realms of the gloriously serene landscape, quivering with warm energy. A cleanly picked three-note guitar figure quietly emerges, oscillating in a steady but unhurried rhythm before vanishing back into the glowing haze. "Bleached Beach" (from a forthcoming album on Important Records) and "Under the Color Cave" (from the recent split LP with Aidan Baker) are equally gorgeous, but I’ll allow you the pleasure of exploring the details without further prattle from me.

Heave and shudder

2010-01-18T21:57:17-05:00

There's a certain impulse among many improvisors to cease playing when it feels right. We (the audience, the performer) are waiting for that dénouement so that when it comes we can say it was good, it's over now, we know it's over, we can clap.

Cellist/vocalist Audrey Chen and trumpeter Nate Wooley had this dénouement which, as any free-improvisation junkie can guess, consisted of some trumpet howls and bow scratching followed by some long tones and softer swells. Except this came about two thirds of the way through the set. For the next few minutes, Chen just closed her eyes and waited, while the rest of us waited to start clapping. She wasn't about to allow it; she picked up the bow again and began bowing the side of her cello, as if to say that ending felt too right to be permissible.

Many improvisors will go ahead with an impulse; it seems that Chen and Wooley's impulse is to question their own impulses. The actual ending, marching off like some military parade, eventually came against all odds and logic.

Check out their performance below:

between the silences

2010-01-18T16:36:44-05:00

I have a strangely inescapable tendency to hear music in terms of temperature – an inability to absorb an aural atmosphere without instinctively consulting the mental thermometer. If my post from last week sought a warmly glowing antidote to the oppressive start of a new winter, I suppose this week I’ve shrugged off the struggle and decided to dive headlong into the surrounding chill. Between the Silences, a work by fascinating NYC composer Tristan Perich, evokes a frigid world of austere beauty – a vast monolith sculpted out of deceivingly simple contrasts. This shared recording comes from a performance at ISSUE dating back to 10/26/08.

Scored for nine strings and nine channels of 1-bit tones (the most primitive form of digital audio, created by sending on and off pulses of electricity to audio speakers), the work dissolves a series of apparent dualities into a singular, all-absorbing tone of haunting weight. Elegant, slowly-unfolding melodic shapes are continuously fragmented, with each successive pitch dispersed to a different timbre of the 18 voice ensemble. Despite the individual, isolated space given to each instrument, the equal-sharing of the glacial melodies serves to unify the disparate voices – obscuring the division between acoustic/electronic sources and blurring all timbral distinctions into an impenetrable field of disconcerting quietude.

The pace gradually wavers back and forth between slow and static; the harmonic density expands and contracts between rich, overlapping waves of dispersed melody and thin patches of isolated sound separated by pregnant pauses of thick silence. Eventually, the work dissolves into a single violin voice, left alone to obsessively reiterate a sole, remaining pitch – casting the same muted utterance, again and again, into an impassive void. We begin to realize that the emotional qualities of the silence and the sound have become identical…the most reliably certain instance of clear-cut duality has too been blurred and absorbed into the severe expanse of cold, enveloping transcendency.

More from Tony Conrad's brain

2010-01-13T13:48:50-05:00

If someone were to keep score of people who have performed at ISSUE, Tony Conrad would be at or near the top. And yet even though he performs almost monthly, guessing what a single performance will be like is a futile game—one we’ve long stopped playing and have never learned the rules to. In the past year he’s dispensed plastic recorders to the audience, bowed strings of beads tied to the bridge of his amplified, fretted, spraypainted black violin, used auto-tune, looping pedals, multichannel overhead clicking sounds, a string quartet, endorsed psychedelic drugs, and had a book written about him.

This is just a selection of those things, some of which are old to the archive and some of which are newer. His performances as Ma La Pert with Jennifer Walshe have already been written about, but check out the two segments from the September 9, 2009 program that featured art historian Brandon Joseph reading from his book, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage. These two segments—Tony’s song, “Sexual Vulnerability,” and his live set—are just a small slice of much of his work. A larger mix, including the Ma La Pert performance and XXXMacarena, is after the jump.

the counterpoint of daydreams

2010-01-09T16:56:32-05:00

For those looking for an hour-long respite from the bitter cold and straining grind steadfastly lurking outside the four walls of your bedroom, allow composer Aaron Siegel’s Science Is Only A Sometimes Friend to send you drifting, swaddled in a blissful stupor, into that hazy, temperate zone somewhere between the clouds and the sun. A warm, inviting bed of sustained organ chords melds into the whistling glow of the harmonic residues of eight chiming glockenspiels, forming a gauzy, sun-soaked orb that encircles the motoric pulsing of ever-shifting melodic fragments.

The composer (on organ) performed the work with the Aaron Siegel Ensemble at ISSUE last month, presenting a slightly re-orchestrated update (swapping audience contribution for organ) of the composition originally premiered last spring in Central Park as part of Make Music New York. The ensemble will be going into the studio next month to lay down a recording for release this fall. Keep an eye out for it.

In the program notes, Siegel suggests the work “tests the science of attention and the counterpoint of daydreams.” At least for this weak-minded listener, to maintain a focused listening perception throughout the duration of the work is to put up a forced, unnecessary struggle against the lulling powers of the gently consonant harmonies and hypnotizing permanence of pulsing rhythms. To engage in this strife is to lose out on the wonderful pleasure of allowing the intricacies of the music and the intricacies of your wandering thoughts to float gradually in and out of focus – internal and external sensualities dancing a woozy tango in which positions of prominence continually shift. The music seeps into the daydreams and the daydreams creep into the music, forming a harmonious feedback loop perfect for fifty minutes of time-obscuring escape.

Viva la Resistance

2010-01-04T13:33:53-05:00

As Phill Stearns put it, he only does this concert about three times a year. Heaving a sigh of relief, “This is the last time this year I’m doing it.”

It’s easy to see why he avoids performing this set very often–sometimes it’s difficult to see why he does it at all. He prepares for his performance quite a bit: building the electronic circuits that cycle amplified feedback through his mixer, tuning the filters so that they only allow particular parts of the sonic spectrum through. The noise created is incomparable and organic, while the lights flash on and off, creating shadows on the back wall.

He says he only actually practices for less than a half hour, just to get the system tuned up, before he turns it off until the performance. Before the performance, he attaches electrodes to six different places on each arm, wiring himself through the transformers so that each time he touches the metallic controllers his body becomes a human resister, controlling the pitch, spectrum, and volume of the sound. The trouble is that when he makes sound, the current using him as conduit causes him physical pain. Watching him hold pitches, seeing him writhe just a bit, his performance is far more visceral than if he had been a cool knob-twiddler.

cable dazed

2010-01-18T18:14:48-05:00

For a group with only a single year –and-a-half old 12” to their name, the Invisible Conga People have maintained an unnaturally pervasive foothold in my consciousness. I find myself spinning (well…digitally spinning, I don’t have a turntable) “Cable Dazed” as regularly now as when it came out last Februrary…which is to say: pretty damn regularly. Justin Simon and Eric Tsai make music with a little bit of guitar, a little bit of vocals, and a huge assortment of analog equipment, much of which has been personally modified, circuit-bent, or otherwise cracked with purpose. I’ve been fruitlessly checking their myspace every month or two for quite some time now, hoping and failing to find a little info suggesting that a follow-up might be in the works (though, finally, as of last week, a new 12” has been announced -- slated for release sometime next summer) so, needless to say, I was thrilled to discover a half-hour set of new music (at least new to my ears) in the ISSUE archives this week.

In a fluid set of continuous music, ICP spool out a hauntingly mesmerizing performance of muted intricacy. This is not so much dance music as the strains of memories of minimal house gingerly reconstituted in a dimly lit room, cavernous and empty. Though seemingly all sounds are run through pedals and processors to varyingly transformative and alien effect, a faint but undeniable glow of humanness remains -- a lonely streak of soul shivering amidst an ever-stretching field of cold, restrained beauty. While the tone is immediately assimilable and the atmosphere remains frozen in a timeless haze, the emotion possesses a quiet complexity inviting endless probing (though melancholy seems an undeniable component). The music itself reflects a similar balance of intricate construction and monochromatic affect – one may either allow the small parts to drift and blur into a singular wash of sound or slowly pull out the fragile components from the bottomless depths of the composition – disembodied vocals, soft eruptions of distortion, slow cascades of arpeggiated synth, groaning bass, calmly droning drum machines... even the comfortingly static hum of amplified equipment. If a lone 12” could provide 18 or so month of stimulation, this 30 minute set can surely last us til next summer.

Superimposition (Four Niblocks)

2009-12-14T17:57:51-05:00

Phill Niblock (pictured) started out the concert by superimposing Four Arthurs on top of Two Octaves and a Fifth. In the spirit of Niblock, I’m superimposing the three sets of the concert (Niblock, saxophonist Jon Gibson, and the Meredith Monk group M6) into a single reading experience.

About a minute after the huge mind-crushing drone starts, the bassoonist and oboist begin pacing very slowly up and down the aisle, while Phill is on his laptop controlling the mind-crushing drones and strains of soprano saxophone meld with diphthongs and evocations of didgeridoos, and earth-goddess Ha-Yang Kim bows perfect fifths. Pentatonic saxophones and time stops as the chord held is not a chord, but instead a single harmonic object, turning as if in uneven light and unable to stand still but unable to hear anything else except some pseudo-primitive tribal language made up of mostly new vowels. The oboist and bassoonist have basically switched places now, with the bassoon in the back of the hall, and soprano saxophone now capable of either short or long notes but nothing in between, and Ha-Yang goes col lengo while sopranos take their cues from one another. Rhythm study for hands, feet and voice seems apt, replacing the soprano saxophone, and even at the age of sixty nine it looks scary up there all alone with no prop, clapping and stomping in ratios of 3:2 and all its extensions, while ratios of 3:2 continue spilling from speakers overhead and as the oboist walks slowly by the acoustic sound separates from the electronic sound–singers in ratios of 3:2, earth-goddess Ha-Yang holding perfect fifths again, while I’m wondering what “Dolmen Music” is supposed to mean, and think I should look it up when I get home although I never do. The sound ends and now it’s negative sound, the ear pushing back, wanting more.

The Seven Storey Mountain

2009-12-07T16:38:35-05:00

This Tuesday at ISSUE Project Room, trumpeter Nate Wooley (Anthony Braxton, Evan Parker, John Butcher), violinist C. Spencer Yeh (Burning Star Core, Thurston Moore, Evan Parker), and drummer Chris Corsano (Flower-Corsano Duo, Paul Flaherty, Six Organs of Admittance) join together in holy-shit revelry, forming a trio as intensely formidable as one might ever be lucky enough to witness. Along with a bracing evening of improv, attendees will also bear witness to the unveiling of a new tape piece from Wooley, expanding upon The Seven Storey Mountain album collaboration with David Grubbs and Paul Lytton (released last month on Important Records). To get warmed up for what should be a staggeringly awesome concert, check the playlist below for some past ISSUE performances from these three men. You’ll hear a newly-shared performance from C. Spencer Yeh (with Greg Kelley and Paul Flaherty) as well as a couple classic staples of the FMA.