Deep Time: Ground Truth(s): Three Night Festival Pass

By donating £25 you can enjoy all three nights of Deep Time with this Festival Pass. Tickets for individual nights can be booked separately (PWYC, suggested £10), from our box office.

Tomomi Adachi, Laila Arafah, Janet Beat, Explore Ensemble, Luke Fowler, Nina Guo, Laure M. Hiendl, Idin Samimi Mofakham, Kate Molleson, Lee Patterson, Mariam Rezaei, Jennifer Walshe, Wobbly.

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 screenings, 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.

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.

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.

Day 2: Friday 27.11.26

Lee Patterson
Calcareophones, 2026
First performance, commissioned by Fruitmarket

Calcareophones is a new piece for chalk, amplification and four channel speaker system. Using chalk as a novel musical instrument, Calcareophones exploits the physical properties of this 70-80 million year old fossilised material when submerged in water. Selected from formations across England and France, where local stratigraphic variations in density, porosity and grain allow a range of sonic possibilities, lumps of this white rock are smashed into smaller pieces to be placed into specially constructed, water filled vessels. As each fragment expels air as tiny bubbles, the sounds produced are amplified to reveal a variety of texture, tone and rhythm creating rich, complex sound forms by deceptively simple means.

Tomomi Adachi & Jennifer Walshe

Tomomi Adachi and Jennifer Walshe have been performing together since meeting in New York in 2010. They share a deep love of extended vocal techniques, electronics and historical avant-garde practices, with a long history of performing Dadaist and Mavo sound poetry, most notably in a bathtub on a rooftop in Tokyo. Their project PUTIF (The People’s Telepathic Improvisation Front) saw the duo stage a series of telepathic concerts, often separated by thousands of miles, at times while both traveling on airplanes. Over the last decade, their investigations into machine learning have meant they are perhaps the only free improvisation vocal duo who have both developed detailed AI models of their own voices.

Wobbly
As Beautiful Music, 2026

You can’t hear the same piece of music twice, especially if that piece of music has only ever existed as a recording. There are two kinds of categories in the world, and you’ll hear both of them at some point during this concert.

Day 3: Saturday 28.11.26

Film: 
Luke Fowler
A Sensation Never Yet Known, 2026
16mm transferred to 4K digital

A Sensation Never Yet Known is a new work by Luke Fowler. It explores the history of electronic music in Scotland through a film portrait of Janet Beat, a pioneering composer and educator whose contribution has been overlooked until recently. Filming the now 88 year-old Beat over the course of a year, Fowler uses film as a medium that attests to presence: of Beat in the here and now, of the camera within her domestic space, and of her life’s work within the larger context of experimental music. Rather than a biographical or narrative work, A Sensation Never Yet Known weaves together moments of conversation. We hear Beat recount her childhood experiences of listening to the natural world, her graphic scores for dancers and the obstacles she faced as a female composer of electronic music. If attentive listening has been central to her work, attentive listening and looking is the foundation of Fowler’s project as it traces the collected objects in Beat’s home, the natural world and animal life that surrounds her, and the ever-present potential in her musical scores. Extending his long-standing interest in how cultural and political figures of the 1960s and 1970s are remembered, A Sensation Never Yet Known also reflects Fowler’s practice as both an artist-filmmaker and a musician in his own right.

Mariam Rezaei
On/Off Beat, 2026
First performance, commissioned by Fruitmarket

A new performance by Mariam Rezaei which will use samples from the electronic music archive of Scottish electronic music pioneer, Janet Beat, who was Jennifer Walshe’s teacher at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

Jennifer Walshe & Nina Guo, with Wobbly
REALITY: The Pilot, 2026
First performance, commissioned by Fruitmarket

What happens when we watch reality television? When we enter the hypermediated fever dream of housewives, singles, makeovers, aspiring models, real estate agents, preppers and wedding planners? When we find our conversation clogged with terms like hometown date, eternal male singles cafeteria and smize? Who do we become, as we laugh, judge, weep, and memeify the fame-hopefuls vying for our attention at any cost? Is it the lowest possible form of entertainment or is there something worth sieving from the trash? Wildly virtuosic vocalists Guo and Walshe are your guides as we descend into the phantasmagoric world of reality TV, where the confessional booth, the elimination ceremony and the reunion special collapse into one endless, glittering loop. Electronics legend Wobbly (Jon Leidecker) is their co-pilot through the latent space. Host and contestant, editor and edited, algorithm and its captive: Walshe and Guo can’t tell which they are, and by the end of tonight’s performance, you may not be able to either.