ACID

Acid is a dissonant string quartet that explores corrosion as both destruction and transformation. Inspired by the 2026 Edinburgh International Festival theme All Rise, the work imagines rising not as triumph but as a chemical reaction. It is unstable, violent, and irreversible; fractured sounds dissolve into noise and dissonance eats away at repeated motifs. Yet within the quartet’s abrasive textures, coherence still emerges in some brief moments. The music pulls towards these moments of alignment. Figures dissolve into each other and are interrupted brutally at different points. Eventually, at the end, the texture dissolves into a very bright chord; one cannot be described as hopeful but one that is not entirely without hope.