Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard (b. 1979) works as a composer and visual artist through an artistic practice that spans a multitude of media.

Løkkegaard considers his practice a form of basic research into realities and is interested in how bubble-like systems unfold as saturated human conditions, and in the ways bodies—individual, collective, material, and perceptual—collide within these conditions.

Collisions between individual bodies and bodies of saturated matter are key drivers in Løkkegaard’s practice, and he explores how such states of saturation can be engaged, softened, or unsettled: how what has become sedimented might be softened, seeking to create ruptures within the saturated.

As a paradoxical strategy, Løkkegaard often explores whether reaching a point of (over)saturation can itself become a means of escaping it, and whether bodies may be saturated to the point where they collapse under their own excessive weight, transforming into something else in the process.

By deploying multiplication and accumulation as possible ways of making individual bodies expand into larger bodies or systems, Løkkegaard examines how the saturation of systems can make them exceed their own boundaries, becoming hypervisible and ghostly at the same time.

The concept of instrumentalization is central to Løkkegaard’s work, leading him to interrogate the meaning, control, and agency of institutions and their instruments. His practice aims to soften sedimented positions and shed notions of Western universalism—often by shifting perspectives away from cultural primacy in a process where firstness is othered.

Multiplication of matters

What happens when matter is multiplicated ?

Niels Lyhne Løkkegaards work often revolves around the idea of (over)saturation as a pivot. How bodies can be saturated in such a way that they collapse under their own (over)saturated weight and thereby becomes something else - almost as a sort of reciprocal emergens.

Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard method of arriving in this (over)saturated state is multiplication of single bodies into several bodies and he has used this method accros several media.

Examples of this is Nullary Sum (2018), Time folding back on itself (2023), The Big Silent (2023-2024),  Du er ikke alene (2023-2024), Potential for 1000 Recorders (2018)  - or in his work with multiplying physical sound expressed in works such as SOUND X SOUND (2013-2017) Triangular Mass for multiple triangles (2016), Birdsongs - for multiple parabolic microphones (2019), SONAR (2018) - for multiple vibraslaps, Harmonia-for multiple harmonicas (2018) and Quartet pour Sigurd Raschér - for 4 alto saxophones (2019).

Sonic potentiality

How to listen through realities?

Løkkegaard is interested in creating situations hovering in between discourses and realities, such as written stories describing sound manifesting themselves as imaginary pieces of music or as soundless Potentials within the listeners mind; -a space of potentiality.

Løkkegaards Symphony No. 1 and Anthology of Sound both inhabit multiple states at the same time - being in constant fluctuation between alphabet, word, language and meaning - & between book, score, written text and imaginary music. The ancient cycle of sounds transforming into words transforming back into sounds is summed up by Marshall McLuhan who said that “Man was given an eye for an ear”, and Løkkegaard is hoping to give back an ear for an eye. 

Niels Lyhne Løkkegaards  interest in how stories about sound can be accepted as being sound detached from any physical manifestation and how the narrative meta-sphere can be a space for artistic action in what could be described as curatorial times, has also lead Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard into creating Curatorium, a curatorial non- event that celebrates sound on an annual basis. Curatorium is a story about a sound-art festival that never takes place - a festival in between realities. Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard raises the question: When does something actually exist?

Research

Title:

Incompletion Places - Surrection and mirage making through topocosmological hypering

Conducted from 2024-2026

Host institution: RMC

Funded by The Danish Ministry of Culture, artistic research program

Title:

Multiplayer - Softenings & inquiries into matters of toxoplasmatic ectoplasm

Conducted from 2021-2024

Host institution: RMC

Funded by The Danish Ministry of Culture, artistic research program

Title

Music for the inner ear- an exploration of sonic potentiality

Conducted from 2017-2019

Host institution: RMC

Funded by The Danish Ministry of Culture, artistic research program

Title:

SOUND X SOUND - Multiplication and layering of sound, attemps of dissolving 

Conducted 2013-2017

Independent

Funded by the Danish Arts Foundation