"The New York composer-performer collective Wet Ink Ensemble presents new work from their Artists-In-Residence program, premiering compositions by Gelsey Bell (voice/daxophone) and Carolyn Chen (keyboards), alongside premieres of the revised versions of works by Wet Ink members Mariel Roberts and Modney."
Wet Ink Ensemble
Erin Lesser flute
Alex Mincek tenor saxophone
Ian Antonio percussion
Eric Wubbels piano
Modney violin
Mariel Roberts Musa cello
Sam Pluta electronics
Kate Soper voice
12.01.25 Vibraphonist, marimbist, and composer Patricia Brennan performed at Roulette. Her ensemble consisted of
Modney violin
Pala Garcia violin
Kyle Armbrust viola
Michael Nicolas cello
Sylvie Courvoisier piano
Miles Okazaki guitar
Kim Cass bass
John Hollenbeck drums
Arktureye electronics
Patricia Brennan vibraphone with electronics, compositions
Eli Greenhoe conductor
Ascending Primes is a number game. Violinist, composer and improviser Modney (née Josh Modney) grew its music from his ongoing interest in the intellectual logic and sensate satisfaction imparted by just intonation (hereafter referred to as JI), a tuning system that favors whole number ratios over the book-cooking compromises of the more widely known equal temperament, which has been the world’s tuning standard since that beautiful sound-culture neutralizer, the piano, made its way around the globe.
Modney found in JI a method that made sense of his instrument; it simply sounded better. But he hasn’t kept the pleasure to himself. The performance units he has assembled for this double album advance in steps dictated by the progression of prime numbers — one, three, five, seven and finally 11 players. His violin, sometimes amplified, is the only instrument to appear in every aggregation. As the ensembles expand and change, so does the music. It is never simple, but neither is it cluttered or unnecessarily busy. Playing alone, the sound of each of Modney’s violin string leaps out, illuminated by the overtones that JI enables and coarsened by liberally applied distortion.
The smaller line-ups are non-standard but exemplify the chamber music aesthetic of exposed interaction between players. At different points Sam Pluta’s electronics and Cory Smythe’s JI-tuned piano disrupt the flow. But as the ensemble’s increase in size and diversity of instrumentation, jazz elements creep in. Ben Lamar Gay’s puckering cornet and Charmaine Lee’s swooping voice adopt jazz-informed, solo voices within the septet, poised atop the multi-directional rhythms of Dan Peck’s tuba and Katie Gentile’s drums. The largest ensemble is also the most inclusive, marshalling hackle-raising strings, gut-rumbling horns, rhythm-opposing clusters, angelic/demonic vocal exchanges and straight-up noise into a sequence of events that seem to be pushing against implacable time-keeping.
There’s a lot of JI music, especially that made by string players, that seems to treat tuning system’s sonorities as ends in themselves, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But Modney has taken another tack. Like Anna Webber, who appears in the largest ensemble, he puts the sounds to work alongside the genre elements to create music that is stylistically unlimited and viscerally affecting.
