Hot on the heels of the BR-Klassik CD, NMC Recordings have released a wonderful album collecting together some of my key pieces for string quartet and solo low strings. These recordings celebrate my close collaboration with the JACK Quartet who bring a stunningly organic aliveness to performances of String Creatures (2022), The Weaver’s Knot (2014) [originally written for the Arditti String Quartet], an ocean beyond earth (2016) for solo cello prepared with thread tied to a violin played by cellist Jay Campbell [originally written for Séverine Ballon] and The Table of Knowledge (2017), recorded by Melbourne double bassist Rohan Dasika [originally commissioned by and written for Florentin Ginot]. Rohan gave a completely mesmerising performance of the double bass solo at the Music Biennale Zagreb in April 2025. All recordings were made at the Melbourne Recital Centre’s Primrose Potter Salon by the incredible sound engineer Alistair McLean.
The album is available through NMC Recordings, Bandcamp and on all the usual streaming services. There are wonderful liner notes by Joseph Browning which is a really, really great reason to purchase it rather than rely on the decontextualised world of streaming…
not only is this a collection of really great music. It is also a great object in itself. (Tim Rutherford-Johnson, The Rambler)
Some reviews…
Four characteristically vivid works by Australian composer Lim are here entrusted to the eminently suitable hands of New York’s JACK Quartet. The outcome is consistently gripping, at times incandescent. Lim manages brilliantly to combine the refinement of her multicultural literacy with an approach to string instruments as sounding bodies that bears her personal touch. The weight of precedent and historical association seems to exercise no constraint whatsoever upon the dynamic, sometimes playful, frequently dramatic interaction of these “string creatures”. From moment to moment, modes of articulation, terms of formal coherence and developmental trajectories reflect the intensity of Lim’s galvanising imagination, sidestepping a hefty legacy of expectations. These performances nurture that singular combination of ruggedness and grace that sets Lim’s music apart. (Julian Cowley, The Wire Magazine, Issue 501, Nov 2025)
Even for listeners familiar with Liza Lim’s work, String Creatures is a revelatory and at times astonishing insight into her transformative music.
Lim has fashioned a unique and remarkably coherent language for string instruments, achieved through a synthesis of eclectic influences and empirical experimentation. Extended techniques are likely as not to be drawn from other cultures such as folk fiddling (Hardanger and Bluegrass) as from the postwar avant-garde. The most extraordinary thing about String Creatures is that, even with its dazzling array of new sounds and extremes of colouration, it always feels like the effects are a natural means to an end, producing a complex expressive statement on the relationship between physical activity and emotional need: a Romantic disquisition made through a renewed, corporeal language… The long final movement, “Flying”, transcends what has gone before it with a strange solo by Dasika, playing bass while holding a taut thread in his mouth, attached to the bass’s top string. His mouth acts as a resonator, producing a kind of overtone singing multiplied by the sympathetic vibrations of the instrument. As a final transformation, the music floats somewhere between bowed string and voice, never fully one nor the other, at once more than and less than human. (Ben Harper, https://www.cookylamoo.com/boringlikeadrill/2025/10/liza-lim-string-creatures.html)
An ocean beyond earth, performed brilliantly by the JACK’s Jay Campbell, continues Lim’s lifelong quest to explore everything possible with a cello, here introducing lines of thread that connect it, like spiders’ webs, to a violin placed opposite. By drawing on these threads, the player is able to make the strings on both violin and cello sound in turn, and so make the instruments talk to and resonate within each other. And to round the disc off, ELISION Ensemble bassist Rohan Dasika performs The Table of Knowledge, a throaty, overtone-rich journey into the toxic and hallucinogenic properties of certain herbs. For the work’s last section, he strings a thread between his bass and his teeth, such that his mouth becomes sympathetic resonator, producing an eerie whistling melody over the low bowed drone: player and instrument literally entwined. (Tim Rutherford-Johnson, Nutida Musik, Nov issue, English version TRJ)
The Weaver’s Knot breathes a familiar modernism, bracing and poetic, but String Creatures gets at something perhaps more personal. The extended central movement conjures up astonishing sonorities; its title, ‘Untethered’, might have been an alternative subtitle for the whole album, not least because all these tetherings unsettle and loosen the ground beneath the listener… What the Jack Quartet and Rohan Dasika (soloist in The Table of Knowledge) achieve here is quite special, melding a plethora of extended techniques into something magical. (Fabrice Fitch, Gramophone)
Podcast
I had the pleasure of talking with radio host and podcaster Dave Lake on his ‘Contemporary Classics’ show (WRUU107.5 Savannah) in a wide-ranging discussion of the pieces which are also played in full: https://www.wruu.org/broadcasts/60360
Launch
A few pics from the NMC launch of both my and Zoe Martlew’s new albums at October Gallery in London on 30 Sept 2025, hosted by the brilliant Gillian Moore. Huge thanks to the whole NMC team!
Liza Lim 