Ground Truth(s) Deep Time: a festival of new music

Fruitmarket’s annual festival of new music, Deep Time, returns this November, this year curated by Irish experimental composer, performer, writer and artist, Jennifer Walshe.

We are living through a strange moment. Machines now generate convincing realities faster than anyone can check them, reality itself often functions in a performative mode, and truths are a matter of choice, whether personal or algorithmic. It can feel as though the ground beneath what we see, hear and trust has quietly turned to dust as slop flushes through the devices in our hands. ‘Ground truth’ is a term with multiple meanings. Geographers use it for the moment you look away from the map or satellite image and walk the actual field, checking what the data claimed against what is really there. More recently, artificial intelligence borrowed the phrase – a ground truth is the verified slice of reality a system’s performance is measured against, the anchor that stops it drifting into invention. In both cases it references the same idea — what we agree to be real. (Which, of course, may or may not necessarily be real.)

Over three days, Jennifer Walshe’s edition of Deep Time features artists who engage with a wide range of artistic realities, from deep and old to frenetic and fractal, in radically different ways.

For her Deep Time commission, Jennifer Walshe and vocalist Nina Guo present REALITY: The Pilot, a new commission that turns its attention to how realities are cast, edited and performed in the “phantasmagoric fever dream” of reality television. For this performance, the duo will be joined by experimental musician Wobbly (Jon Leidecker), who will lead their voices through his Monitress system, navigating an ecosystem of broken iPads and iPhones trying to figure out exactly what pitch a voice is singing at a given moment (and more often than not, disagreeing).

Lee Patterson will bring a new work made from chalk. In Patterson’s delicate set-up fossilised sea creatures seventy to eighty million years old, calcified into chalk, are submerged in water and amplified as the chalk slowly dissolves and pushes tiny bubbles through its pores.

Elsewhere the festival moves between extremes of scale and approach. Tomomi Adachi, joining Walshe for a duo performance, deconstructs language back to pure sound, using machine learning and his sensor shirt to involve the body in triggering vast waves of electronic sound. Turntablist Mariam Rezaei rips apart vast music vocabularies on her decks, treating the turntable as an instrument capable of astonishing detail and force. In a commission for Deep Time, Rezaei will use samples from the electronic music archive of Scottish iconoclast composer, Janet Beat, who was Walshe’s electronic music teacher while she was studying at the Royal Conservatoire in Glasgow. Explore Ensemble, one of the UK’s most adventurous new-music groups, perform recent works by Idin Samimi Mofakham, Laila Arafah and Laure M. Hiendl — music that stretches, layers and reshapes our sense of time from within.

Alongside the performances will be a programme of talks and conversations, which will include a lecture by Wobbly on the long, surprising history of sampling and machine-made music, a reminder that computers have been quietly helping to compose for far longer than today’s headlines suggest, alongside pre-performance conversations with writer and broadcaster, Kate Molleson. The programme also includes film screening, featuring Glasgow artist Luke Fowler’s portrait of Janet Beat, A Sensation Never Yet Known, which was made over a year of Luke’s visits with the composer, now in her 89th year, and was first shown in Glasgow International earlier this year.