Qua - Silver Red

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4...according to our Ant on Thu 14 Aug, 2008.

Another good CD this week. There's a few out right now... who on earth said summer was quiet for music? Qua on Someone Good with their ace CD called 'Silver Red'. The cover is amazing with these weird cute disturbing mice things with huge sharp teeth and things. Well graphic design....Qua is a one man show who goes by the name of Cornel Wilzcek and he's collaborated recently with Lawrence Pike (who's in Pivot who have an album this week on Warp and he's in Triosk as well the busy sod). Here we have 4 tracks of weird experimental electronic pop. There's defo some elements of Steve Reich in there but also some of twinky beaty side of Four Tet. There's so much going on sometimes it feels like everything is being thrown at the speakers and your ears will buckle under the weight of the music. Bizarrely though it all fits together like loads of different coloured peas on a fork being lifted into your fat toothy mouth. I'm not quite sure how people make music like this. It's complex yet coherent.... they're surely mental. It should be like a massive pile up on the motortwat with cars and huge heavy goods vehicles in a sprawling mess but it's like futuristic lanes of space traffic gliding in the sky. It's really rather good anyway.

"Silver Red" has been an evolving piece of music from Qua aka Cornel Wilzcek. Over the course of two years Silver Red began to take shape, with the piano and guitar source material originally recorded in 2005 at a live performance in Melbourne. This source material was loaded into an ever-growing custom software patch controlled by a French invention, the Lemur - a multi-touch, programmable screen – that eventually became the backbone of the composition. While it evokes ideas from Steve Reich, Philip Glass and other rhythmic minimalist composers, it also owes much to colourful explorations of artists such as Moondog and Roberto Cacciapaglia.

In 2007, Laurence Pike, of Sydney bands Pivot (Warp Records) and Triosk (Leaf Records), took to the drums performing with Qua live and in the studio. As well as playing on Qua's upcoming pop album, Laurence played a one-take drum part that was then loaded into the custom Qua software patch and re-performed by Cornel, thus lending it the same treatment as the other
source material.

"One Second" is a reaction to "Silver Red". It felt necessary to somehow resolve the album and boil it down to a few simple sounds. It looks at Silver Red from the view point of artists such as Ennio Morricone, Kristoff Komeda and Scott Walker and somehow extrudes one second of time from Silver Red.

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