** CD Deluxe box set limited edition ** Recorded on 22 January 2022 in Brooklyn, Live at ISSUE Project Room captures a unique encounter between two radical guitar sensibilities, frozen at the precise moment their languages intertwine. On one side is Loren Connors, an iconic figure of avant‑blues whose five decades of work have reduced the electric guitar to the barest, most essential gestures: hanging notes, smudged chords, a sustained vibrato that seems to remember the entire history of the blues while almost erasing its outlines. On the other is Alessandra Novaga, a Milan‑based guitarist and composer who has walked a path from rigorous classical training into the open territories of experimental music and improvisation, treating the guitar as a source of grain, resonance and breath rather than an instrument of virtuoso display. Together, in the resonant dark of ISSUE Project Room, they draw a delicate, haunted map of what happens when two artists committed to listening as much as playing step into the same soundfield.

The performance unfolds as an almost whispered conversation. There are no themes in the conventional sense, no obvious call‑and‑response; instead, Connors and Novaga work with particles of sound – quivering harmonics, brushed strings, faintly outlined intervals – letting them drift toward each other and overlap. Silences are not gaps but materials: pauses that thicken the air, making every new attack feel consequential. At times the guitars seem to align into a single beam of detail, their timbres braided so closely that it’s hard to tell who is responsible for which filament of sound. Novaga’s higher, glassy grains and micro‑oscillations dance around Connors’s darker, more spectral sustains; elsewhere, a minimal melodic droplet emerges, as clear and isolated as a piano note struck in a distant room, then dissolves before it can harden into motif.

What the album documents is less a “set” than a shared act of deep attention. The energy is contained rather than explosive: tension builds not through volume or density, but through the way both players hold back, test the edge of a sound, let it decay fully before introducing another. There are moments of gentle fracture – a rough scrape across the strings, a slightly sour bend, a sudden swell of feedback – that function like hairline cracks in a painting, reminders of the physical effort behind the apparent weightlessness. Between two notes there is always a breath, and in that breath a tiny recalibration of the relationship: each musician deciding whether to follow, contrast, or simply leave space. The result is strangely gripping: a music of almost‑nothing that feels full, because the listener is constantly being drawn closer to the threshold where something becomes audible.

This ISSUE Project Room appearance was also the season‑opening night for the venue, and formed part of a larger constellation that included another duo set by Connors with Kim Gordon, seven years after their first collaboration. In that context, the Connors/Novaga performance feels like a parallel text: where the Connors/Gordon pairing leans into friction and noise, Connors/Novaga explores restraint and micro‑detail, an atmosphere of benevolence in which each sound seems to ask for permission before entering. It’s a snapshot of a particular community at a particular moment, but it reads as much more than scene documentation: an object lesson in how improvisation can function as revelation rather than showcase.

The individual histories feeding into this meeting are substantial. Born in 1949 in New Haven, Loren Connors has long been a pioneer of what has come to be called “avant‑blues,” moving through periods that reframe folk forms, abstract painting and silence in guitar terms. His brief, concentrated pieces often feel like Rothko canvases translated into sound – fields of colour where the interest lies in saturation and edge, not in linear development. Over the years he has been cited and sought out by a wide array of independent musicians: Oren Ambarchi, Jim O’Rourke, members of Sonic Youth, Keiji Haino, Alan Licht, Suzanne Langille, Jandek and many others have either drawn inspiration from his work or shared stages and studios with him.

Alessandra Novaga, trained at the Musik Akademie in Basel, has shifted from classical repertoire toward projects that interrogate the guitar’s role and possibilities. Collaborations with the likes of Stefano Pilia, Elliott Sharp, Travis Just and Kid Millions have shown her ease in settings that demand both precision and risk, while her solo work frequently draws on cinema (with a special affinity for Derek Jarman) and architectural ideas, translating images and spaces into slow‑unfolding sound structures. She has appeared at festivals such as Angelica, Festival dei Due Mondi and Donaueschinger Musiktage, and at key avant‑garde venues like Café OTO and ISSUE itself, consistently pushing the instrument beyond chord‑voicing and linear melody toward a vocabulary of textures, overtones and almost inaudible events.

Live at ISSUE Project Room distils these trajectories into a single, continuous line. It is a document of two guitars, two biographies and two territories briefly overlapping, but it feels, in the moment of listening, like one extended, fragile voice. The mystery is that so little, so sparingly placed, can carry so much emotional weight. The record doesn’t explain that mystery; it simply invites you into it, and leaves an echo that lingers long after the final sound has vanished.