Quaquaquaqua
In the award ceremony that perpetually runs in my head—all swooping cameras and rousing orchestral versions of indie-pop hits—Qua was awarded ‘Most Beautiful Song’ last year. The (tastefully well-sculpted) gong was awarded for this track from his Painting Monsters on Clouds LP.
- Qua
- Secret Space
- from Painting Monsters on Clouds
- No longer available
“Secret Space” begins like everyone’s favourite expero-electro-ambient ditty (what’s yours?). A droning warm synth tone welcomes everyone and shows them to their seats before the main attraction begins; distorted, humming, melodic, it twists around itself until a beat softly emerges. Soon thereafter, an acoustic guitar, melodica and a crystalline xylophone-style melody bow and begin (christ, I don’t know the timbre difference between a xylophone and glockenspiel, so I’m hedging). And here now we have the drums; a sort of stammering yet steady beat; its cymbals waver and fade unnaturally—they’re processed and sound like a dusty old tape that could only take so much information, capacity reached and superfluous sound dithering to nothing.
There’s a kind of contrast here between the ragged digital edges and the smooth analogue melodicism, between the premature decay of cymbals and the dreamy strum of an acoustic guitar. It’s familiar from the world of Four Tet and Caribou/Manitoba, but better. Our Qua is more controlled and less histrionic. (Just don’t call it “organic,” please. Cheers.)
Former Adelaide-resident and Melbourne-resident-at-last-I-heard Cornel Wilczek is the man behind the guitar/computer/synth/everything in this one-chap Qua show. He regularly constructs tiny symphonies of layered sound. On other tracks from the 2004 album, Cornel’s shimmering fractal melodies are like electronic stars pressed into songs, ever-changing and ever-clear; they’re coruscate, kaleidoscopic chains of sounds, threaded together precariously. (Metaphors, as mixed as you could get them.) Some tracks, like the hyperactive “Luckybuster,” work in the everything-in-the-kitchen-sink approach of beatbusters like Matmos and Books—the skittering samples of scrapes, pops, bottles and pans sounding like the most rhythmic and harmonised collapse of a dishes pile ever. And that, I’m sure you’ll agree, takes a certain kind of skill…
Album out through Surgery Records. Buy it – that’s an instruction, not a suggestion.