Frozen Moments is a stunning debut album by the young Danish composer Mette Nielsen, featuring the brilliant and award-winning Danish string quartet, NOVO Quartet, and the masterful clarinettist Jonas Frølund. The album’s works explore various ways to enter sound, pause time, or otherwise alter it, and offer an introspective collection of compositions that challenges the listener to ponder the nature of time and sound.

Frozen Moments is the debut album of Mette Nielsen (b. 1985), a student of Bent Sørensen and Niels Rosing-Schow among others, presenting a snapshot of a decade in the life of the composer.

Songs and singing are a vital component of Nielsens workwork, even when no vocal chords are exercised in its performance.

Mette Nielsen often works with what she calls the almost unison or imperfect unison – a state of friction that exists between two minutely differing frequencies.

This album includes the trilogy of related works Alone, Together and Apart, that puts into practice a modular technique inspired by Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, as each score reveals further truths about the two others.

In Alone we hear the solo clarinet exploring a space in all its emptiness. Apart gives us the other side of the story – the space itself as embodied by string quartet. Together, as the name suggests, unites the two scores.

The NOVO Quartet, founded in 2018, has quickly made a name for itself as one of Denmark’s most exciting young ensembles. Jonas Frølund is one of Denmark’s most promising young clarinettists, having studied in Copenhagen and at the Paris Conservatoire.