Deep Time: Ground Truth(s) Day 1: 26.11.26. Wobbly and Explore Ensemble
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.
26.11.26. 5–9pm. Pay What You Can, suggested £10.
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.
The bar will be open at Fruitmarket before the performances and until 10.30pm every evening. Snacking boxes will be available for pre-order in the café.
The artists will be in conversation with writer and broadcaster Kate Molleson before the performances.
Day 1: Thursday 26.11.26
Lecture
Wobbly
Automated Variations, 2026
Links between plunderphonia, feedback music and algorithmic composition, the intrinsically new compositional principles of electronic music, all generate tools which raise questions for those who use them: what kinds of automation are worth creative exploration, and which kinds are safe. A trip through the roots of autonomous instruments from Louis and Bebe Barron onward, reminding us how little is truly new about the latest revolutions suggested by neural net rendering.
Explore Ensemble
Explore Ensemble presents recent works for string trio that question how we locate ourselves within sound and memory. Idin Samimi Mofakham’s As I lay down brings strings, electronics, and poetry into a dronescape of remembrance, while Laila Arafah’s Sibelius Studies 2 sees music notation eat itself alive in a surreal play of glitch, fragmentation, and improvisation. Laure M. Hiendl’s expansive Chronochromatic Variations III takes quotations from Anglo-Irish composer E. J. Moeran’s 1931 String Trio, subjecting them to processes of cutting, looping and reassembly, to transform a late-Romantic source into an uncanny afterimage of musical pastoralism.
