Description
NMC presents String Creatures, the new album from award-winning Australian composer Liza Lim. The album gathers together four of Lim's so-called 'string creatures', pieces which explore string both as a material and as a metaphor forrelations in the world around us. As Joseph Browning puts it in the liner notes, the featured works are 'strange beasts, with wild voices and eccentric bodies that tie humans, instruments and ideas together in novel configurations'.
String Creatures (2022) is brought to life by Grammy Award-nominated JACK Quartet, who Lim sees as a 'hybrid organism, as a multiplicity of bodies and minds and desires'. Beginning with three short 'diagrams of grief', the piece goes on to weave a 'shifting fabric of glittering sound' (Lim). The same quartet present The Weaver's Knot, which takes Norwegian hardanger fiddle playing as a source of inspiration. Musical tension is accumulated, held and released like the binding and unbinding of a knot.
The remaining two tracks on the album are for solo string instruments. JACK Quartet cellist Jay Campbell plays an ocean beyond earth, suggested by an ocean beneath the icy crust of one of Saturn's moons. The cello is literally tied to a retuned violin, creating a suitably otherworldly sound-world. Finally, the five movements of The Table of Knowledge are brought to life by Rohan Dasika, modifying his double bass with thread and using his own voice to evoke the traditional hallucinogenic 'witches' flying ointment'. As Browning says, it's 'hard to believe these sounds come from a single player and instrument'.
