There’s a similar approach to material in Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard’s Colliding Bubbles (surface tension and release), a composition for string and harmonica quartet. Again, a drone, but in service of a more elaborate conceit. Løkkegaard draws upon the behaviours of bubbles in collision, how the forces at work may cause fluctuations in surface tension, or ruptures in which tension is released. That sounds like a principle behind a Xenakis piece, but Løkkegaard’s method and material are very different. It may not even be a method as such, more of a philosophical or poetic guide without seeking a direct analogy in what or how the musicians play; despite this, however, the piece expresses its principle through fundamental activity rather than through interpretation. String quartet and harmonica quartet are to be, one and the same: here, Quatuor Bozzini follow the composer’s instructions to play their usual instruments while also playing harmonicas. Both involve slow, constant tones, simultaneous throughout, presenting a challenge for the musicians. The Bozzinis can maintain diaphanous harmonies indefinitely, sure, but those even tones become more fraught when they’re also required to blow with a similar lightness. Despite the references to bursting bubbles, there’s nothing explosive here, just the constant unsteady and fragile balance between pitch and timbre as the colouration of the two sets of instruments clash and the pitch and force of each note wavers minutely. The piece begins in the high register, slowly descending somewhat lower before finding a sort of resolution, with the transition to a lower register bringing its own challenges in maintaining tone, even as the pitch seems to settle. Both here and with the Winter album, there’s a tension at work which drives the music, with a seemingly implacable surface that reveals itself to be made up of many softer strokes in combination.

Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard is a composer based in Copenhagen. On his latest EP he joins forces with the premiere Canadian string quartet for new music, Quatuor Bozzini, to create a piece that deals with the perception of bubbles replicating the human experience. In addition to the harmonics played by the strings, the players are required to play harmonicas at the same time. At first blush, this might sound like a gimmick, but the conception of the piece as instability and friction emerging from continuous sound, like bubbles colliding in space and, concurrently, the often tense unpredictability of the human experience, makes these choices instead seem organic and well-considered. As the piece unfolds, the register of the pitch material makes a slow decline from the stratosphere to the ground floor with a simultaneous long decrescendo. The quartet are masterful musicians, unfazed by the challenge of playing long bowings and long-breathed harmonica chords simultaneously. The resulting sound world is shimmering, liquescent, and surprising in its occasional metaphoric bubbles popping.

A work for string and harmonica quartet, requiring the musicians to play harmonica and stringed instrument simultaneously. Ignoring for a moment the physical difficulty of the exercise to concentrate on the sound, we are confronted by a thick collection of tones and overtones mixing and/or bouncing off one another in unpredictable ways. Weird agglomerations of beat frequencies arise and rescind, and there is a continuous, subtle undercurrent of friction or perhaps an “undertone” throughout the entire piece.

There is a lot to pay attention to here, as each new set of tones enters and adds to the complexity of the overall sound, which seems to shift almost seismically at times. How can there be mass and fragility at the same time? Pull away and take in the entirety, or listen carefully to one hovering aspect, each approach has its rewards. It is never static.

The best thing I can think to write about this work is that I listened to it in my car over the course of a couple of days, not fully realizing that it was less than 30 minutes long. It seemed not to end, and I was quite happy with that. John Cage once said that when we call something beautiful, what we mean is that it holds our attention. I think this work surely qualifies. I shall return to it often, and I will seek out other work by the group.

Danish composer Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard is a dyed-in-the wool experimentalist, often setting up situations where related instrumentation is stacked up to unleash engrossing harmonic activity. For this fantastic new work, he asked Montréal’s exceptional Quatuor Bozzini to function as a double quartet, requiring them to all play harmonica at the same time they created sounds with their usual string instruments. Løkkegaard attempts to translate the morphing of microscopic organisms, colliding into one another, through sound. As suggested by the work’s title — Colliding Bubbles — he envisioned sounds crashing into one another to generate sonic fissures pushed beyond the brink by harmonic stressors. It’s telling that the artwork for the album features nothing more than a series of microscopic images of bubbles, in which tiny pockets of air within a loosely circular blob create a web of elaborate shapes of varying size. The sustained chords bowed by the quartet produce electric, shimmering lakes of sound shadowed by halos of harmonic white noise. The string sounds are subsequently splintered by the strident harmonica tones. On the surface not much happens, but once we can pierce that skin and burrow in the core sound a new world of coloristic abstraction emerges. Dig deep enough and time will seem to freeze over its 29 psychedelic minutes.