Deep Time is a festival of new music and sound, featuring commissions and performances from some of the leading radical and experimental composers, musicians and improvisers working today. Making its debut at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket, it explores in sound, ideas of time and temporality, stasis and movement, provocation and play, ritual and activism in art and music, with its exponents drawing their inspiration from geology, philosophy, popular culture, the natural world, and with the need for art to engage with the reality of the climate crisis.

The festival will premiere two inventive new commissions by award-winning German-based Croatian composer Sara Glojnari?, and Dundee-based Japanese composer and improviser Shiori Usui who join a lengthy list of practitioners making up four days of performance, improvisation, talks, late night DJ sets and curated playlists, created in a spirit of innovation and boundary-challenging.

The programme has been developed with the University of Edinburgh, whose Talbot Rice Gallery is showing an accompanying exhibition on the work of Scottish geologist Charles Lyell (1797–1875), whose work, highly relevant today, revealed the immensity of geological time, and shifted our understanding of the Earth, and the impact of human activity on its climate and geological processes. As part of the festival, Usui has been Composer-in-Residence at the University’s Charles Lyell Collection.