Niels Lyhne Lokkegaard & Quatuor Bozzini - Colliding Bubbles (Important, 2024)

By Eyal Hareuveni

Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard is an experimental-interdisciplinary Danish composer whose work spans from contemporary composition and sound art to performance, conceptual and visual art. He considers his work to be basic research in realities and is interested in how bubble-like systems unfold themselves as human conditions. The meetings between individual bodies and different bubble-like systems and his works investigate the ways to escape these bubbles, and if not escape them, then how they can be warped, wrestled and renegotiated.

Colliding Bubbles (surface tension and release) is Løkkegaard’s composition for the Canadian string quartet Quatuor Bozzini (first violinist Alissa Cheung, second violinist Clemens Merkel,  violist Stéphanie Bozzini and cellist Isabelle Bozzini), meaning that Quatuor Bozzini is playing string instruments while playing harmonicas. Together, the eight instruments play a subtle game of timbral and harmonic attraction and repulsion. Løkkegaard composed before works for multiple pianos, clarinets, hi-hats, triangles, parabolic microphones, vibraslaps, harmonicas and alto saxes.

Løkkegaard says that he wanted to suggest different kinds of collisions of the “bubbly matter” that will lead to different ruptures and possible release of surface tension. The minimalist fluctuations between the statis-like, delicate vibrations and overtones of the more prosaic harmonicas and the classical string instruments, represent the collisions of these “bubbly matter”. Løkkegaard has perfected this method of arriving into (over)saturated state of multiplied bodies or systems of sound and on the 29-minute Colliding Bubbles he allows the reverberating sounds to collapse slowly and organically under their own (over)saturated weight and become something else, meditative and thoughtful timbral phenomena. 

You can think about this impressive composition as a sonic meditation about the human condition. It asks the musicians and listeners to rebel against the linear time concept and the nonstop sonic stimulations and find their collective sonic haven, where the individual sounds dissolve into the collective sound. 

Listen and download from Bandcamp.