String Quartet(s)

The recordings included both notated music and free and guided improvisation, in both acoustic sound and with feedback pedals.

Over its vast duration the music develops and varies a number of musical tropes, such as a star-like glitter, bird-like and insect-like sounds, musical unisons, quasi-tonal chorales, digital glitches and drones, electronic distortions of the acoustic sound, modernist avant-garde gestures, noise, multi-layered as well as very sparse textures, industrial as well as serene sounds, long haunting solo passages for the individual instruments, techno-like beats, layered spoken text, hiss, cuts, loops etc... - all of which is punctuated again and again by periods of silence.

The overall effect is of a giant musical meditation which pulses, shimmers and fluctuates between mainly sparse time spans and sporadic clusters of dense musical activity, and which connects the listener to the vastness of the land, nature and sky of its remote Outback environment, as well as to the vast sparseness of boundless outer space.

[2] The number 4 is an overarching feature of String Quartet(s), as it is of the Cobar Sound Chapel architecture by renowned architect Glenn Murcutt which houses the composition.

[3] According to Lentz, the process of recording itself became one of the central concerns of the composition and anything from high-end professional equipment to a tinny smartphone was used.