Deep Time: Ground Truth(s) Day 2: 27.11.26. Lee Patterson, Tomomi Adachi & 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.

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. 

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. Both 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.