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Wet Ink, featuring Ian Antonio, is named “Best Ensemble of 2018” by The New York Times

Percussion Faculty member, Ian Antonio, is part of the Wet Ink Ensemble, which was named Best Classical Ensemble of 2018 by The New York Times.

Now in its 20th year of adventurous music making, the Wet Ink ensemble consists of Ian Antonio (percussion), Erin Lesser (flutes), Alex Mincek (saxophone), Eric Wubbels (piano), Josh Modney (violin), and Kate Soper (voice) and Sam Pluta (electronics).

The NY Times article states:

The Wet Ink Ensemble celebrated its 20th anniversary this year. That checks out: Wet Ink is an extremely well-drilled contemporary music group. That doesn’t happen overnight.

But the idea of two decades is a little strange. It makes this group seem older than its music-making does. I don’t know of a classical ensemble with a more joyously hard-edge, go-for-broke attack than that required by the pianist and composer Eric Wubbels’s “Auditory Scene Analysis, Part One.” This first track from one of Wet Ink’s 2018 albums requires complex handoffs of melody between different instrumentalists, long blasts of white noise and some sumptuously Dionysian playing from the rhythm section…It can start to seem a little unfair to the rest of the contemporary classical scene to put albums by this crew in every year-end list. On the 20th anniversary of their founding, perhaps it’s enough to call them the best band of 2018.

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