A quare sound
A crest a crash a sizzle
You look at me and my pulse-width modulates
The cyborg in me recognizes the cyborg in you
A crest a crash a sizzle
I look at you and I’d rather look at you than all the virtual realities in the world
except maybe the moon…
and the fact that you move so beautiful more or less takes care of Futurism
And the way you whisper and sing more or less takes care of futurity
You sing in tune with the sample rate of the universe
It’s not exactly utopia that springs from your lips
but it is some sort of realization
A crest a crash a sizzle
A quare sound indeed
dance music for the end of straight time
modular synth instruments live sampled, sequenced, and performed by colmkil
mastered by @glia
“wild peas” features field recording of wild pea pod percussion performed by theo o’gara
additional musical samples from glia
poetry samples from gabi abrao and frank o’hara
supplemental reading is available, but not necessary
feel free to enjoy the ep in a state of aimless namelessness
theory
“quare” is a word with vernacular connections to both hiberno-english (possibly yola) and black-american english, it was brought into queer theory by E. Patrick Johnson (“Quare” studies, or (almost) everything I know about queer studies I learned from my grandmother) as well as Irish scholars such as Noreen Giffney (Quare Theory) and Joseph Volante (Quare Joyce). Johnson was looking for a way to activate some sort of political potency back in to “queerness” which was felt to be adopted as an assimilationist stance by cis white queers, while the Irish theorists were using it more to reflect the postcolonial context of Ireland in relation to England and english and the gender and sexual politics that intersect with the colonial/postcolonial relations.
there is some overlap between these two projects — building a utopianist vision around anticolonial antihegemonic conceptions of self, and freeing ourselves from the paradigm of pragmatism and assimilation. i’m also drawing on José Esteban Muñoz’ Cruising Utopia here, in thinking about the utopian potential of queerness and what “futurity” even means to queers who live under threat of violence of all kinds, and the looming shadow of death. in this context, i was also thinking about dance music. about the queerness of it, and the black-american queers at the center of its invention, in particular. the way queer culture survives despite everything, the reverberations of trauma in the music, but also the reverberations of life, the creation of utopia in real time, in rhythm.
this is not nostalgia, this is something to hold on to for the fight that is now.
so this is my attempt at making some kind of dance music. quarewave imagines a future where cyborgs dance all night and one lonely cyborg, filled with relentless love and hopeless rhythm, wanders to the seaside to watch the last sunrise. the end of straight time… but queer time doesn’t operate linearly. its future is now and its future is forever. the universe is full of quare sounds if u listen.
tools
The entire album was recorded in live takes, except for “wild peas” which had field recording layered in the box.
the modular system was:
just friends was the synth voice, with grandpa playing samples from glia’s dek
drums were synthesized on the moog DFAM
the modular and DFAM were both mixed in bastl dude and routed into norns
cheat codes sequenced just friends, clocked DFAM, and live sampled everything. it was the compositional center of this entire album. thank u @dan_derks for such an inspiring tool