Composer Simon Christensen has an eclectic musical background, but the string quartet has been central to his output. Decades of work with the genre has resulted in deeply moving works that have reshaped perceptions of what music for string quartet can be. His most recent quartet EKSTASIS was written for the forward-thinking NeoQuartet from Poland, dedicated to reimagining the boundaries of the string quartet tradition.

The result can be heard on a new digital album to be released on 21 February. Pre-save the album via this link.

A pulsating inner life

Simon Christensen's (b. 1971) background is eclectic: He studied composition at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen and at the Paris Conservatoire and is now employed as an organist, but the aesthetics of popular music are also a vital part of his creative DNA.

At the heart of Christensen's work we find an intense interest in rhythm. It invests much of his music with the feeling of a pulsating inner life and constant micro-movement, and rhythmic complecitiy is always central in his works.

Music with a seductive power

The string quartet genre has been central to Christensen output. In 2014 his string quartet MANIFEST – But There’s No Need to Shout proved a moment in Danish music. The work probed the very idea of what a string quartet could be, using only the open strings of the instruments and their rich overtone series.

His latest quartet, the 45 minute EKSTASIS, written for and recorded by the Polish NeoQuartet, is a work with a seductive power entirely its own. Christensen paints a clear picture from a mass of detail, at once meditative and ferocious, and draws us into the new sound dimension he has found in the string quartet.

Distortions and displacements

All the way through, the four instruments can appear to be in a state of constant development towards new horizons or a passport to the next viable soundscape. The gradual process takes the musicians into different terrains, from light swaying dances and introspective, glacial chords to rattling noisy sections comprised of brutal, blade-like grestures from bowed strings.

The whole is spiked by a feeling of awry tuning derived from the instruction to tune two of each instrument’s strings down by one eighth of a tone. Rhythmically, Christensen also works with distortions and displacements, which give the impression of the music momentarily gusting into a higher velocity or being weighted into a lower one – its metre compressed and then expanded – thus altering our perception of rhythmic progress and of time itself.