TIME:SPANS Festival Presents Wet Ink Ensemble in Premieres by Alex Mincek, Sam Pluta, Mariel Roberts, and Ben Lamar Gay

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Katy Salomon | Morahan Arts and Media
katy@morahanartsandmedia.com | 863.660.2214

TIME:SPANS Festival 2021 Presents 
the Wet Ink Ensemble, August 20

Performing World Premieres by Alex Mincek, Sam Pluta, 
Mariel Roberts, and Ben Lamar Gay

“dense, wild, yet artfully controlled” – The New York Times

www.wetink.org

New York, NY (July 27, 2021) — On Friday, August 20, 2021 at 7:30pm, Time:Spans Festival presents the Wet Ink Ensemble in a program of world premieres at The Dimenna Center for Classical Music’s Mary Flagler Cary Hall. The concert features the in-person world premieres of Wet Ink members Alex Mincek’s So Many Ways (2021), Sam Pluta’s Systems of Interaction I (2021), and Mariel Roberts’ or we don't need light (2021) as well as Ben Lamar Gay’s Known Better. Still Lit (2021).

Mariel Roberts’ or we don't need light (2021) explores translating the ever changing continuum between light and darkness into a purely sonic context. She says, “Light, both practically and metaphorically, defines our sense of space and environment. It serves to illuminate, obscure, direct, or diffuse our attention. It also physically impacts our corporeal experience, bridging the gap between interiority and exteriority of perception.”

Ben LaMar Gay describes Known Better. Still Lit (2021) as “a new work that explores memories within a city's grid system as well as in the absence of said grid. The material is based on Chicago's relationship between sound, grids, flow and the abrupt openness of the Great Lake. Known Better. Still Lit is made of tone cycles that are reshaped through collective memory and used as suggested routes to both escape and reposition oneself inside the grid.”

Sam Pluta’s Systems of Interaction I (2021) continues his 20-year practice of creating computer systems and compositional systems where users/machines/players interact to create musical dialog. This work, the first in an ongoing series, explicitly explores agent-based interactions between instrumentalists, scores, and software to produce a constantly unfolding tapestry of sonic relationships.

Of So Many Ways (2021), Alex Mincek says, “In So Many Ways I’ve tried to arrange multiple ways of perceiving logical, meaning-bearing narratives for each individual musical parameter: timbre, pitch, duration, amplitude, envelope and texture. For example, the harmonic language in the piece has been arranged so that it might be equally understood or felt as arising from either a purely intervallic set of rules, or a completely tonal framework, or from an entirely acoustic point of view. Of course these individual logics, attached to individual parameters, become highly convoluted since they often unfold simultaneously at different rates of progress. For this reason, the musical materials have been reduced to a rather bleak collection of utterances. But dear listener, perhaps you don’t make sense of any of it after all. Perhaps you simply hear a succession of isolated sounds passing by aimlessly with no discernable raison d’etre? That’s ok. That’s just one of the ways.”

Program Details
Time:Spans Festival Presents Wet Ink Ensemble
Friday, August 20, 2021 at 7:30 pm
Mary Flagler Cary Hall, The Dimenna Center for Classical Music | 450 W 37th St. | New York, NY 
Tickets: $20 for General Admission, $10 for Students and Seniors. On sale August 1, 2021 at 9:00am ET
Link: https://timespans.org/concert/wet-ink-ensemble/

Alex Mincek – So Many Ways (2021) [World Premiere]
Sam Pluta – Systems of Interaction I (2021) [World Premiere]
Mariel Roberts – or we don't need light (2021) [World Premiere]
Ben Lamar Gay – Known Better. Still Lit (2021) [World Premiere]

Wet Ink Ensemble
Ian Antonio, percussion
Erin Lesser, flute
Alex Mincek, saxophone
Josh Modney, violin
Sam Pluta, electronics
Mariel Roberts, cello
Eric Wubbels, piano

with
Ben Lamar Gay, trumpet

TIME:SPANS Festival will operate at 50% capacity and will be checking vaccination statuses at the door. More COVID-19 Safety Protocols are listed at https://timespans.org.

About 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 octet 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’s programming celebrates the nexus of composition, improvisation and interpretation, from early collaborations with Christian Wolff and ZS to pioneering portrait concerts of Peter Ablinger, Mathias Spahlinger, Anthony Braxton, and the AACM composers, work with renowned creative musicians such as Ingrid Laubrock, Peter Evans, Darius Jones, and Katherine Young, and long-term collaborative projects with Wet Ink’s four acclaimed composer-members (Alex Mincek, Sam Pluta, Kate Soper, and Eric Wubbels).

Wet Ink has been in residence at institutions including Duke University, EMPAC (Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center), Columbia University, the Royal Academy of Music (UK), and The Walden School, among many others, and has been featured on numerous recordings. Highlights include Katharina Rosenberger’s TEXTUREN, which was awarded a German Record Critics Prize, and solo records by Alex Mincek (Torrent), Kate Soper (IPSA DIXIT), Sam Pluta (Broken Symmetries), Eric Wubbels (Duos with Piano, Book 1), and Josh Modney (Engage), all of which were celebrated on various “Best of” lists by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Bandcamp Daily, Sequenza 21, and The Nation. Wet Ink has released four acclaimed solo albums (Wet Ink Ensemble; Relay; Wet Ink: 20, which features the Wet Ink Large Ensemble; and Glossolalia/Lines on Black).

Wet Ink is co-directed by an octet of world class composers, improvisers, and interpreters that 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). The Wet Ink Large Ensemble is a group of extraordinary New York City musicians that come together to play the world's most exciting and innovative music. Learn more at www.wetink.org.

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