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16 Speakers in a Silo: ISSUE Project Room on the Gowanus

In 2005 a young Brooklyn avant-garde venue moved into a silo by the Gowanus Canal and installed a 16-channel hemispherical speaker system for composers to write for.

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ISSUE Project Room opened in February 2003 in a garage on East 6th Street in the East Village. Its founder, Suzanne Fiol, was a photographer whose prints are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Brooklyn Museum, and the room began as the project space of Issue Management, the photo agency she had launched with Jan-Willem Dikkers and Martynka Wawzyniak. The first event was a concert she curated with guitarist Marc Ribot honoring Frantz Casseus, the father of Haitian classical music.

In June 2005 ISSUE crossed into Brooklyn and moved into a renovated 2-story silo in an industrial park on Carroll Street, by the Gowanus Canal. The ground floor held installations and a tea room, the upper floor was kept for performance, and the June 1 opening benefit featured Butch Morris conducting, Ribot on solo guitar and Dorit Chrysler on theremin. That fall, Jandek played his second ever New York bill there, and the Village Voice named ISSUE the best avant-garde music venue of 2005.

The silo also got a new kind of sound system. Composer and engineer Stephan Moore built a 16-channel array of hemispherical speakers, hosted as a long-term installation so composers could write new works for it. "Electronic music has traditionally relied on front-firing loudspeakers," Moore explained, which send sound in one direction, unlike acoustic instruments that radiate it all around. His speakers let "electronic instruments take on the characteristic intimacy of acoustic instruments," building on work begun by Dan Trueman and Perry Cook at Princeton in 1997 and continued with Curtis Bahn at Rensselaer from 2001. Julien Ottavi and Dion Workman broke it in from September 18 to 20, 2005 with Spati0silo, a single 36-hour piece made from sound captured on the grounds, inside the silo and inside their computers. The official launch followed on October 1 with Al Margolis, Scott Smallwood, Workman and Moore.

A rent increase pushed ISSUE out of the silo in 2007, to a loft in the Old American Can Factory. In 2008 it won a 20-year rent-free lease on a theater at 22 Boerum Place, in McKim, Mead & White's 110 Livingston Street building, to build "a Carnegie Hall for the avant-garde." Fiol died of cancer on October 5, 2009, at 49. In late 2021 Two Trees Management donated the theater to ISSUE, the permanent home she had wanted, and Moore still sits on its Artistic Advisory Council.

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