James Weeks: weatherworld quartets

This cycle of six quartets, each around ten minutes long, explores our sensory and bodily experience of the outdoors - the ‘weatherworld’. Their sonic landscape is pervaded by rain and wind, sounding out the surfaces and bodies of the instruments in a delicately mesmeric weave of harmonics, open strings and unpitched noise; sustained, glanced, brushed, tapped. In two quartets the bow is replaced by plant materials – fern fronds and cypress sprigs – heightening the exploration of an intimate, immersed way of being in the natural world that speaks urgently to our need for ecological reconnection.