Uploaded October 2020 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Across two concerts at hcmf// 2019 Wet Ink Ensemble performed a range of new works from Charmaine Lee, Bryn Harrison, Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, Sam Pluta, Eric Wubbels, and Kristina Wolfe. Studio recording available via Huddersfield Contemporary Records – Wet Ink Ensemble, ’Smoke, Airs’ – nmcrec.co.uk/huddersfield-contemporary-records/smoke-airs

wetink.org
cerenem.org
brynharrison.com

Bryn Harrison: Dead Time (2019)

Many of the compositions I wrote between 2000–2018 utilise discrete patterns in which near and exact repetition operate in close proximity. For the listener, this calls into question notions of sameness and difference. Hume’s dictum that “repetition changes nothing in the object repeated but does change something in the mind which contemplates it” (Deleuze, 1994) became a defining aesthetic statement for me during the process of writing in this period. It illustrates how duration might be experienced as a state of perpetual ‘becoming’, through which each moment is perceived as being distinct from that which precedes it–even if, in that moment, one is hearing the same material again.

My experiments with this approach to musical perception have prompted me to explore perceptual thresholds, boundaries and states of ambiguity. I have begun to work more directly with technology to experiment with combinations of pre-recorded and live sound. Significantly, the shifting relationship between digital and live loops has offered a new perspective to my work. The mechanical reproduction of the loop through digital means makes explicit the fact that each repetition is a carbon copy of what directly precedes it, and this has raised the question of how the experience of time might be different for listeners as they perceive repetition that is digital as opposed to live.

Dead Time (2019) challenges the listener’s perception of time by juxtaposing loops of material that are performed ‘live’ and those that are heard as pre-recorded ‘virtual’ loops. Drawing upon Lisa Baraitser’s Enduring Time (2017), and in particular, her notions of delaying, waiting, repeating, and persisting, I have begun to question my previously held ideas about perpetual ‘becoming’ by questioning what constitutes ‘sameness’ and, by extension, how listening in the present might also involve imagining the past.


///Credits

Wet Ink Ensemble
Alice Teyssier, flutes/voice
Alex Mincek, saxophone
Ian Antonio, percussion
Eric Wubbels, piano
Josh Modney, violin
Sam Pluta, electronics

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival
19-20 November 2019

A project presented in partnership between CeReNeM, hcmf//, and Wet Ink

This project was made possible thanks to the generous support of the University of Huddersfield’s University Research Fund (URF), European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (#750618 & #725899) and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Wet Ink Ensemble, ’Smoke, Airs’
Huddersfield Contemporary Records, September 2020
nmcrec.co.uk/huddersfield-contemporary-records/smoke-airs

Video by Angela Guyton