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. The festival made its debut last year at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket and returns with a programme inspired by New York composer John Cage (1912–92) and artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–88), who made their marks at the gallery in 1984.
Curated by British vocalist, movement artist and composer Elaine Mitchener, the centrepiece of the festival is a newly-commissioned performance based on the fact that in 1984 both artists, whose work blended visual art with sound and music, were ‘shown’ at The Fruitmarket Gallery (as it was then known), as part of the Edinburgh International Festival.
Cage, who was a senior and hugely-influential figure in avant-garde music, exhibited works on paper in the Gallery’s upstairs space, while downstairs, the young painter Basquiat was showing his paintings, which encompassed influences such as jazz, hip-hop, no wave music, poetry, and art history – his first institutional exhibition.
Responding to the idea of an imagined conversation between Basquiat and Cage, Mitchener has worked with choreographer-director Vietnamese-American Dam Van Huynh on the piece, Moving Eastman, which centres on the life of the Black American composer Julius Eastman (1940–90).
The full programme encompasses a Scottish dimension, and incorporates works, performances and discussions by contributors such as the ensembles Apartment House and Scottish Circus Ensemble, piper Brighde Chaimbeul, writer and broadcaster Kate Molleson, the late American composer Pauline Oliveros, musicians Aidan O’Rourke and Simone Seales, Japanese sculptor and sound artist Rie Nakajima, and artist and writer Esi Eshun.
The festival recalls the radical underground art milieu of New York in the 1980s, and the 1984 collaboration of Cage and Scottish traditional music band the Whistlebinkies, who group gave an improvised performance; now composer and fiddler Aidan O’Rourke revives that blend of traditional Scots and avant-garde by putting together a renewed version of Scottish Circus, accompanied by improvisations around ancient Gaelic song – a music that Cage loved.
