Liza Lim: String Creatures

I’m so thrilled to have my four works: String Creatures (2022), The Weaver’s Knot (2014), an ocean beyond earth (2016) and The Table of Knowledge (2017) collected on the newly released NMC album. Strings are at the centre of my compositional thinking: whatever I happen to be writing, there’s something about the expressive metamorphic qualities of stringed instruments that provides a sonic template for what I’m searching for. Everything is a proto-string instrument for me: a vibrating thread - whether made of animal intestine, silk, metal or a stream of air - strung over a resonating body that can be caressed, plucked, sounded. In my piece Multispecies Knots of Ethical Time, the musician Winnie Huang dips a violin into the Eigenthal-Rümlig river and the force and flow of the stream of water ‘bows’ the strings to produce a haunting 
aeolian sound.

Strings are a living material embedded deep in our cultural imagination because they teach us so much about what it is to relate. For me there’s a complex intelligence there. Strings prompt a whole language where we can speak of weaving, knotting, binding and unbinding; through string we can conceptualise forms of time, of memory and of loops of experience; imagine patterns of entanglement, tension and release. All that is so suggestive of compositional ideas for me. I think one thing that is really remarkable in this recording is the ‘aliveness’ of the sound

The JACK Quartet play with an incredible vibrancy as does Jay Campbell in the cello solo – itself a kind of quartet where the 4 cello strings are tied with cotton thread to the 4 retuned strings of a violin. Rohan Dasika in the double bass solo uses a linen thread tied between the top bass string and a wooden holder in his mouth to shape overtones over a bowed drone note (think of Jeff Beck’s and David Gilmour’s use of the ‘talk box’ to merge their voice and guitar sound; there are many other examples in popular music). Who is playing whom? Who speaks or sings, who is spoken and sung through?

At the end of the piece String Creatures, the musicians get into a groove of repeated rhythmic patterns using breathy bow strokes. I felt a shift in the intelligence of the weave of the music. In the score, the players are asked to begin vocalising with breathing sounds and sung tones as if being sounded by their instruments in a role reversal. I’m deeply grateful to the musicians, to NMC and all the supporters that made this album a reality. May it take on a life of its own!

Liza Lim, August 2025

Buy Liza Lim's String Creatures here