Smoke, Airs Wet Ink Ensemble

• Charmaine Lee:
• 1 Smoke, Airs 11:05
• Bryn Harrison (b. 1969):
• 2 Dead Time 21:37
• Kristina Wolfe: A Mere Echo of Aristoxenus:
• 3 A Mere Echo of Aristoxenus: I. Ghost Aulos for Vitruvius 10:06
• 4 A Mere Echo of Aristoxenus: II. Heptaehon 07:04
• Pierre Alexandre Tremblay (b. 1975):
• 5 (un)weave 14:57
• Total Runtime 01:04:49

Info for Smoke, Airs

New York's Wet Ink Ensemble is a collective of composers, performers and improvisers dedicated to adventurous music-making. Named The Best Classical Music Ensemble of 2018 by The New York Times, Wet Ink's work is rooted in an ethos of innovation through collaboration, extending from the band atmosphere of Wet Ink's core ensemble of composer-performers to projects with a broad range of renowned creators.

Smoke, Airs brings together four works for instruments and live electronics from composers connected to Wet Ink and the Centre for Research in New Music (CeReNeM), exhibiting eclectic and innovative approaches to texture, gesture and musical time.The essence of Charmaine Lee's Smoke, Airs is suggestion the material is made up of whistles, whispers, sandpaper, textual sensations and vocal utterances. Coalescing as hazy strata and organised blocks, Lee takes the listener through various sonic spaces, as if moving through the rooms of an abandoned house. Dead Time continues Bryn Harrison's interest in challenging the listener's perception of musical time. Here, Harrison sets up a dialogue between acoustic and electronic loops, building an interplay between live and sampled elements that results in an unspooling of melodic fragments, leading to one of Harrison's most daring approaches to musical form.

Kristina Wolfe's A Mere Echo of Aristoxenus is a set of two pieces based on the ancient accounts of aural architecture of two lost sites, a large Greco-Roman amphitheater, as described by Vitruvius, and the Echo Stoa in the Olympic Sanctuary in Marathon, Greece. These works, emerging from virtual, digital reconstructions of the historical sites, expand and resonate, creating a shimmering three-dimensional image of a space long past. (un)weave, by Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, brings the record to a close, revelling in the beautiful complexity of the noise of busy, unfolding, and unwoven experiences. Fusing acoustic and electronic sound into a dynamic, fleetingly intertwined relationship of construction and disintegration, (un)weave reveals the great beauty in the complex dislocation immediately following sharp changes in musical trajectory, at the very moment when time feels elastic.

Wet Ink Ensemble

The Wet Ink Ensemble
is a collective of composers, performers and improvisers dedicated to adventurous music-making. Named “The Best Classical Music Ensemble of 2018” by The New York Times, Wet Ink’s work is rooted in an ethos of innovation through collaboration, extending from the music and the unique performance practice developed in the “band” atmosphere of Wet Ink’s core ensemble of composer-performers, to projects with a broad range of renowned creators, from Evan Parker to George Lewis to Peter Ablinger, and committed performances of music by young and underrepresented composers, from today’s most promising emerging voices to the next generation of artists.

Hailed for “sublimely exploratory” (The Chicago Reader) and “dense, wild, yet artfully controlled” (The New York Times) performances and “uncompromisingly original music by its members, and unflagging belief in the power of collaboration” (The New Yorker), Wet Ink has been presenting concerts of new music at the highest level in New York City and around the world for over 20 years. Wet Ink has an extensive discography, and has released three solo albums on Carrier Records: New Works for Small Ensemble (2009), Relay (2012), and Wet Ink: 20 (2018), which features the Wet Ink Large Ensemble, a collection of 28 leading NYC-based new music performers.

Wet Ink is co-directed by an octet of acclaimed creative musicians who collaborate in band-like fashion, writing, improvising, preparing, and touring pieces together over long stretches of time. These directors are Erin Lesser (flutes), Alex Mincek (saxophone), Ian Antonio (percussion), Eric Wubbels (piano), Josh Modney (violin), Mariel Roberts (cello), Kate Soper (voice), and Sam Pluta (electronics).

Charmaine Lee
is a New York-based vocalist. Her music is predominantly improvised, favoring a uniquely personal approach to vocal expression concerned with spontaneity, playfulness, and risk-taking. Beyond extended vocal technique, Charmaine uses amplification, feedback, and microphones to augment and distort the voice. She has performed with leading improvisers Nate Wooley, Id M Theft Able, and Joe Morris, and maintains ongoing collaborations with Conrad Tao, Victoria Shen, Zach Rowden, and Eric Wubbels. She has performed at the Met Breuer, ISSUE Project Room, Roulette, the Stone, the Kitchen, and MoMA PS1. As a composer, Charmaine has been commissioned by the Wet Ink Ensemble (2018) and Spektral Quartet (2018). She was recently an Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room (2019).

Booklet for Smoke, Airs