Wet Ink Ensemble Presents COLLABORATIONS: HUDDERSFIELD COMPOSERS With Vocalist Charmaine Lee

On Friday, December 13, 2019 at 8:00 P.M. at St. Peters Church, Chelsea, the "sublimely exploratory" (The Chicago Reader) Wet Ink Ensemble presents a concert of collaborations from the 2019 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, featuring the US premieres of sextets written for Wet Ink by UK-based composers Kristina Wolfe, Bryn Harrison, and Pierre Alexandre Tremblay; NYC-based voice phenom Charmaine Lee; and Wet Ink's Eric Wubbels. Wet Ink debuted these works at hcmf// in November 2019 and recorded them for release on Huddersfield's HCR label. The program features the US premieres of Charmaine Lee's Smoke, Airs (2017 rev. 2019); Bryn Harrison's Dead Time (2019); Pierre Alexandre Tremblay's (un)weave (2019), Kristina Wolfe's A Mere Echo of Aristoxenus (2019), and Eric Wubbels's modules/relationships (2019); all written for Wet Ink.

Charmaine Lee will join the ensemble for her work, Smoke, Airs, which merges tightly structured improvisation with Lee's acrobatic vocal technique, at turns mysterious, playful, and brutal. Kristina Wolfe's A Mere Echo of Aristoxenus explores the structural, mathematical, and spiritual meanings of sound through the acoustic reconstruction of two lost Ancient Greek sites, as part of Wolfe's ongoing research in sound and music archaeology. Dead Time, Bryn Harrison's second chamber composition written for Wet Ink, weaves an intricate texture of micro-repetition with subtle and ever-changing timbral variation, juxtaposed with electronic interruptions that play with one's perception of time in fascinating and unexpected ways. Pierre Alexandre Tremblay's (un)weave features a rich palette of live electronics processing and fixed media in a brightly virtuosic ensemble work inspired by a crowded metropolis of independent yet interacting people. Of his new work, Eric Wubbels writes, "modules / relationships is an open-form work that explores continuums between freedom and determinacy, openness and specificity, concrete meaning and abstract expression in sound. The materials in the piece manifest musical relationships, social relationships, and explicitly personal relationships between the instruments and the members of the ensemble, drawing on many years of playing and being together. The piece takes advantage of the unique fluency of the Wet Ink Ensemble in embodying an extremely broad range of musical practices, including virtuosic notated music, electronics, theatrical performance, and improvisation."

Performance Details
Wet Ink Collaborations: Huddersfield Composers and Charmaine Lee
Friday, December 13, 2019 at 8:00 P.M.
St. Peters Church, Chelsea | 346 W 20th Street | New York, NY
Tickets: $10 general admission, free for students (no pre-order, cash only at the door)
Link: www.wetink.org/pages/events.html

Repertoire:
Charmaine Lee: Smoke, Airs (2017 rev. 2019), for Wet Ink sextet [US Premiere]
Bryn Harrison: Dead Time (2019), for Wet Ink sextet [US Premiere]
Pierre Alexandre Tremblay: (un)weave (2019), for Wet Ink sextet [US Premiere]
Kristina Wolfe: A Mere Echo of Aristoxenus (2019), for Wet Ink sextet [US Premiere]
Eric Wubbels: modules/relationships (2019), for Wet Ink sextet [US Premiere]

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