| Issue #006 (December 2003) |
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| Qua |
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Interview by Bob Baker Fish
It’s late into the business end of Saturday night at Revolver, a cool bar/ venue on the fringes of Melbourne’s inner city. We can tell it’s cool because all night we’ve been served alcohol by someone who looks remarkably similar to the lead singer of No Doubt, kind of sporty and trashy, with an overextended cleavage and the words ‘sick bitch’ temporary tattooed above it. In the back room, there is the excitable chatter of inebriated punters as a DJ is spinning laidback jazz-infused house as everyone sprawls haphazardly across couches. In the front room meanwhile we’ve been treated to almost the antithesis, a number of diverse interpretations of the electronic music form. Organised by participants of the local Symbiotic Collective, the idea behind ‘Word to the Motherboard,’ was to take the performers out of their comfort zones, to team them up with other artists and see what happens. Consequently we’ve been treated to the likes of Jason Sweeney (Pretty Boy Crossover) getting all 80s new wave with Two4k, Terminal Sound System and Digit Span Test aggressively locking in atmospheric beats and pulses, and Rhett Wade-Ferrell, Ai Yamamoto and Joel Stern battling feedback and getting abstract tones, wails and drones using all manner of instruments and techniques. For many though the highlight of the night came last, thanks to the intimate and uplifting squiggles of local electronic iconoclast Qua melding with the innocent tones of Architecture in Helsinki’s Cameron Bird.
'We’ve only been able to rehearse for about five minutes so it’ll probably be a little rough,' confessed a sheepish Cornel Wilczek (aka Qua) when I arrived a few hours earlier, however I shouldn’t have heeded the warning as the resulting sounds were anything but. This probably has to do with the shared sensitivity both artists possess, despite their differing methods of achieving it. In their day jobs they both delight in delving headlong into bright, nice, tender melancholic sounds, and if it’s possible for two separate worlds to evolve independent of each other, then somehow meet and coexist in perfect harmony (excuse the pun) it would be Qua and Architecture in Helsinki, a fact not lost on Wilzek.
'It’s just a really nice halfway meeting point with a lot of the things we are doing,' he mentioned to me a week earlier in the back garden of his home in inner city Melbourne, a place he also shares with a couple of other sound obsessives, including fellow electronic artist Ai Yamamoto. 'It’s just been a lot of fun. He’s one of the few people I’ve ever worked with that it’s so fluid, that it happens so quickly and easily we’ve never ever had to discuss what we’re doing. We did a track yesterday in three hours, we’re gonna try to do an EP.'
Even amongst the more lauded overseas kiddietronica, folktronica or electronica subgenres Qua’s sounds are something special. Sure there are some vague similarities to the likes of Mouse on Mars, Plaid or even Melbourne’s Jeremy Dower, though throughout his music as Qua, Wilczek manages to maintain a certain clarity of focus and singularly unique vision, somehow creating light yet complex structures with elements of electronica and regular instrumentation. Unlike many electronic musicians Wilczek actually knows how to play regular instruments, starting guitar at the tender age of six and fooling around with his older cousin's four track from about ten onwards. It was from these four track experiments that he believes that he developed his arranging skills.
In his teenage years, after having played in a few bands in Adelaide, Wilczek found work as a session guitarist, even travelling to the US in an ill-fated attempt to break into the lucrative LA market.
'I pretty much walked away from all of that and was pretty disgusted with the whole environment there and came back and didn’t touch guitar for literally five years,' he relates. 'I didn’t know what half the sessions were. To be honest all the people I met there were dickheads: didn’t like music. It was a job. They were more interested in the coke afterwards and the prostitutes. Seriously it was amazing. I’ve never seen anything like it. It was sex and drugs. And I was 17 and I was not interested,' he thinks for a minute, 'hang on, I take that back, I was, but not in that context. I honestly went there for the music so it was pretty disruptive to go there and find out it wasn’t about the music at all.'
The key to Qua’s distinctive sound stemmed initially from the discovery of some old four track tapes he recorded as a kid that he uncovered whilst he was packing for his move from his native Adelaide to Melbourne about three or four years ago. At the time he was quite astonished by their quality and expressiveness.
'I was just really blown away at how articulate these songs were, even though they were very simple, very rough.' He relates. 'So I moved to Melbourne and really wanted to take on that. I guess it was a conscious effort to…; he makes lame voice, '…get in touch with my inner child. Actually to a degree that’s pretty much what it was, taking on a lot of those melodical structures that I used to work with at this age and having had musical experiences doing soundtracks and what-not I thought "what can I do with this?" "How will this translate now with the knowledge I have now in music theory and technology?" And that’s how it started reinventing things I did as a kid. So yes, it has that overly melodic child-like thing. I love it.”
More than simply taking and completing something from his past, Wilczek also partially attributes the development of Qua’s tender and emotive sound as a response to the sound art he was exposed to as part of a media arts course. 'At one point all that I was hearing and seeing in Melbourne that was interesting was on the sound art side of things so I applied those techniques and that kind of philosophy to music.'
Clearly Wilczek is very different from your average electronic musician. Apart from his forays into session musicianship and the incorporation of his past into his current output, he is also a huge Yes fan. And immensely proud of it thanks to a heavy diet of prog-rock as youngster. When they toured recently he couldn’t believe his luck.
'Seeing Yes two weeks ago was one of the highlights of my life,' he gushes. 'It was amazing. I actually went thinking I’m just going to go so I can cross them off that list because they meant so much to me as a kid. They literally started me playing music. Technically it was all there plus more and that was very surprising. I didn’t expect them to go that far, but musically overall it was just really genuine and quite sincere. And it didn’t feel contrived or surgical in any way. It had that earthiness. And I met them afterwards and they ended up being the nicest guys I’ve ever met.'
He now has a photo with Rick Wakeman that he swears he will put on his website regardless of what anyone thinks. And this is partially the key to Wilczek. Just becomes he makes electronic music doesn’t mean that he either listens to it or has forsaken his past.
'I think I’ve worked out what I like to listen to and it’s got nothing to do with the actual sound sources. My main focus and my main passion has been arrangements and I like complex arrangements in music; I love it, that’s why I listen to Burt Bacharach and things like that. It’s all about the arrangements. I’m not a fan of model-based music. I find a lot of electronic music is based around that, and that’s fine. I just can’t connect to it. I like keychanges. It’s almost like it’s bad to do keychanges in electronic music these days.'
Then again it’s almost like it’s bad to make prog-rock these days and this hasn’t stopped him either, playing baritone guitar with members of Little General, who have evolved beyond their post rock ways, added Wilczek to their fold, named themselves Maersk whilst skirting dangerously towards a prog rock vein yet again. Clearly much to Wilczek’s delight.
Wilczek’s debut album as Qua entitled Forgetabout, was a minor revelation, a truly amazing, engaging and emotional musical document, that more than held its own with its local overseas contemporaries, a mixture of electronic sounds, real instrumentation and yes, actual key changes. Currently at work on the follow up, Wilzek reports that it’s an album that has grown out of his live laptop performances over the last year, where he is regularly forced to make important arrangement decisions on the fly. In fact this is why enjoys playing in a live setting, because regardless of the gravity of the situation for good or ill he only has a split second to decide how the music will be structured, whereas in the studio typically these decisions could be laboured over for weeks. Interestingly, the album was actually completed about three months ago, however since no one was urgently requesting it, he used the opportunity to let it rest so he could come back to it with fresh ears. Though in retrospect, having spent the morning frantically mixing down, perhaps it may not have been the best thing to do.
'There’s so much that I want to do to it now and I don’t really have the time,” he laughs. “Sometimes finishing things immediately can be nice. I was reading an interview with Martin Scorcese where he said that sometimes he needs the film distributors to take the film out of his hands because he’ll just keep on working on it. And it’s getting to that point now.'
One noticeable departure for this album is the use of live collaborators, as the last album, though it featured guitar, xylophone, drums, bass, keyboards and thumb piano, they were all played by Wilczek. On the follow-up his intention was to again use as many live instruments as possible, perhaps turn it into more of an orchestra than an electronica album, and though he hasn’t done this (he’s saving this for a third album), he has enlisted some vocal assistance from Pretty Boy Crossover’s Jason Sweeney on a delightfully childish track as well as his aforementioned sparring partner Cameron Bird. Wilczek explains the development in terms of coming in from the cold.
'The only reason that Qua hasn’t used others in the past is because when I first moved here I didn’t know anybody. So it was a way to kill time and get familiar with an environment by doing this stuff that made me feel like I was active. Now I know people so now I feel like I can play with them. At the moment I’m writing a lot of stuff with other people.'
Having recently completed remixes/ reworkings of B[if]tek, Machine Translations and Architecture in Helsinki tracks, performing occasionally with housemate Ai Yamamoto and local weirdo Quokenzocker in an improvisational mini disc field recording/found sound ensemble, whilst also contributing to Maersk, collaborating with Bird, and playing solo Qua shows, Wilczek is certainly making the most of a thriving artistic community that surrounds him. He’s like the veritable kid in the candy store, though unlike the kid, he’s a little choosy about which candy he’ll take.
'After the first album I got to meet a lot more people doing electronic music,' he reflects. 'First it was insular. Now that I’ve met more people I’ve slowly found out that a lot of people making that music because they never played any instruments and here’s a way to make sounds and music without having to know how to play an instrument. And that’s great; that it opens up a whole world to people who don’t have the training is fantastic. What concerns me is that they didn’t want to make music until a computer came along. Why not? So I guess other people that make electronic music that I do relate to and I am working with and doing collaborations with are those that played instruments anyway and that aspect I’m really enjoying. Music never started because a computer came along.'
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