FLOSS your music: Quirq
They say there are orchids that bloom only once a century. It’s only one of those things that happen only from time to time, and you’re lucky (or unlucky) if you caught them “in the act”. It happened to me with Quirq: I had been in LAU just for a couple weeks when he released “Beyond Triple Point (parts 1-3)”, a prog-rock suite that has been a decade in the making.
What’s in a name?
I can’t describe Quirq’s origins better than he did:
I was released a month after Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here”, around the time of Van der Graaf Generator’s “Godbluff”, but have yet to be certified gold or platinum! I was born – and still live – in the part of the world that produced Allan Holdsworth, Bill Nelson and Steve Rothery.
He was born in a music-inclined family: both his older brothers and his sister have been or are still involved with music; and a new generation, Quirq’s nephew, is already dabbling with guitar and bass. He himself lived in a “golden age” of musicianship when he was a child, playing in a youth orchestra and learning flute, violin and piano.
But other kinds of music nudged Quirq away from the Right Way of classical music: heavy metal (Iron Maiden) and classic rock (Led Zeppelin) were knocking at his door by influence of brothers and friends; and by 17, having had an epiphany watching “Live at Pompeii” by Pink Floyd, he sort-of broke up with classical music and bought his first guitar, a second-hand Epiphone Strat copy. Quirq’s parents despaired seeing that all their effort to turn their child into a classical music genius was being thwarted by some long-haired and possibly stoned guys in questionable outfits. He left flute and violin for the electric six-string, though the grounding in theory that his classical education gave him has been fundamental in his music.
Quirq is also a fan of classic cars (owning a 1973 Triumph Spitfire sports car, “slightly modified to go a teensy bit faster”), and has recently become a motorbike rider. Yes, girls: he’s got a sports car, he’s a biker, he plays guitar and he’s single. I didn’t ask about tattoos, but sure he’s got ‘em too. Go get him before it’s too late!
But other kinds of music nudged Quirq away from the Right Way of classical music: heavy metal (Iron Maiden) and classic rock (Led Zeppelin) were knocking at his door by influence of brothers and friends; and by 17, having had an epiphany watching “Live at Pompeii” by Pink Floyd, he sort-of broke up with classical music and bought his first guitar, a second-hand Epiphone Strat copy. Quirq’s parents despaired seeing that all their effort to turn their child into a classical music genius was being thwarted by some long-haired and possibly stoned guys in questionable outfits. He left flute and violin for the electric six-string, though the grounding in theory that his classical education gave him has been fundamental in his music.
Quirq is also a fan of classic cars (owning a 1973 Triumph Spitfire sports car, “slightly modified to go a teensy bit faster”), and has recently become a motorbike rider. Yes, girls: he’s got a sports car, he’s a biker, he plays guitar and he’s single. I didn’t ask about tattoos, but sure he’s got ‘em too. Go get him before it’s too late!
Music
Quirq’s music is heavy prog rock: not heavy in the “metal” sense, but meaning that it strays intentionally from mainstream rock, getting up to the neck into progressive sound, far from blues-based music. The only common ground that we could establish were Pink Floyd and Marillion. As he reckons, his influences are “prog and mostly fairly obscure stuff”:I’m influenced very much by Änglagård, White Willow, Sinkadus, Anekdoten and a host of other Scandinavian prog bands. There’s a healthy dose of English pastoral influence in there as well: Camel, Genesis and things like that.
Quirq likes to say that “a good composer borrows from others, whilst a great composer steals”. It’s virtually impossible for a musician to be influence-free, but great musicians take what they’ve been fed, filter it through their abilities, tastes and obsessions, and make it their own. It’s no longer the property of the original artist, but something new and hopefully interesting. For example, most people think that “All along the watchtower” is a Hendrix track, not a Bob Dylan song because Hendrix took it and totally re-invented it and made it his own.
Melody Maker
A very unusual feature of Quirq’s composing method is that he tries to find melodies and themes first and then fit the chords underneath, not the other way around. In particular, he says:I always seem to end up with very safe and staid chord progressions though, even then! But it allows more freedom for the theme or melody to go where it wants. Voice-leading of chords can generate some nice melodies, but I find that often the melody inherent in the chords is so strong that it can be difficult to write other melodies to fit over.
Another feature is his liking for odd time signatures. In “Beyond Triple Point” we can find the usual 4/4, a bit of ¾, 15/8 and 17/8. For me it’s always been difficult to measure such things, but Quirq divides it into groups of two and three and then uses the word “apple” and “galloping” to count them (slightly based on an Indian method to do the same). So, for him 15/8 could be 2+2+2+2+3+2+2/8, and 16/8 could be 2+2+2+3+2+2+3/8. That way, “you can put them together any way you want to put the accent in different places, moving around the long (three) and short (two) pulses”.
Coming to Linux
As we all did, Quirq started his musical endeavours using Windows. He used some freeware for his first recordings, because he wasn’t sure whether his PC would be up to the task and whether he’d stick with it, and didn’t want to be forking out a lot of money for DAW software. But in the end, he didn’t go very far. He was already using a lot of Open Source software (Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice), and with help from a techie friend, he took the next step and installed DeMuDi. From then on, it was a question of learning about recording and mixing, and getting to grips with Ardour and a few bits of other software.This said, it’s obvious that he believes in Linux as music making OS:
Great engineers can make great sounding records with basic tools and a fool with all the gear and no idea will churn out crap. There’s no reason why you can’t make great sounding music with Linux, it just depends on your workflow and whether you feel you need specialist features, which are only available with some specific app on a specific other OS.
Freedom and music
The current turmoil in the recording industry (illegal downloading of music, copyright issues) is one of my favourite subjects, because everyone seems to agree in the essentials (artists should be free to choose if their music is to be paid for or not) but there’s a new spin every time I ask about it. Quirq has an interesting theory involving the “low quality listeners” of nowadays’ music:
I sometimes think the bar to listening to music has been lowered much too far. You can blame the ubiquity of cheap MP3 players for that. There are many people that supposedly listen to music that reckon they really care about music, but have probably never heard it properly, just as MP3s on players with cheap DACs through a pair of cheap earbuds. And even when listening conditions are better, how many people actually actively listen, rather than just sitting there passively “hearing” music? I think all this does a real disservice to musicians and engineers.
This devaluing of music leads on neatly into the areas of intellectual property and compensation. I think copyright and most other intellectual property is fine and a Good Thing. You see a lot of people trying to justifying warez or uncleared sampling on music forums and a lot of it just seems to me to be a distorted sense of entitlement. The same goes with illegal downloading of music. It pisses me off that people are so disrespectful of the musicians or developers they supposedly like.
I think if some musicians or other artists want their art to be free, fine, that should be entirely up to them. But I don’t think music should be free, as in, no-one should ever have to pay for music.
There’s also another kind of freedom involved: not the listener’s, but the musician’s. Music is easier than it ever has been to make and distribute, and this, in theory, should give musicians more freedom. They should be able to do whatever music they want and avoid corporate labels, who tyranically imposed their own agendas over the musicians’ art. Or shouldn’t they?
The irony is that the demise of the big corporate labels has possibly made music much more commercial and artists less artistically free. What I mean is, bands are having to become personally much more business-like and spend more of their time conducting their own business affairs and less making music.
So, it seems that for musicians the price of freedom is not eternal vigilance, but it’s not cheap either.
Beyond Triple Point
I’ve never really been into prog rock, but my experiences with Julien, Quirq and the bands they mentioned has burnt into my brain the idea that you can’t say you’re doing it if your tracks last less than 9 minutes. At 9:29, “Beyond Triple Point” is a suite of three parts (so far) whose genesis lies 12 or 13 years ago. Quirq worked on it on and off all these years, and released it only recently.
There’s a lot of odd time measures; drum-less interludes; ethereal guitar and synth solos; and a little of heavy distorted guitars (yay!). The mix has a lot of “breathing air”, if you get my drift: instruments are crystal clear, very well defined, and never too many of them at once. This all gives the track a somewhat stark feeling, different from the lush instrumentation of Julien’s compositions (which are the nearest reference I have). Having a real guitar makes a lot of difference too, as it sounds very authentic and integrated into the mix. Quirq’s way of composing (first the melody, then the chords to fit) makes the whole very tight, with the guitar parts driving the song and not just a loose improvisation over some pre-recorded chords.
There’s a lot of odd time measures; drum-less interludes; ethereal guitar and synth solos; and a little of heavy distorted guitars (yay!). The mix has a lot of “breathing air”, if you get my drift: instruments are crystal clear, very well defined, and never too many of them at once. This all gives the track a somewhat stark feeling, different from the lush instrumentation of Julien’s compositions (which are the nearest reference I have). Having a real guitar makes a lot of difference too, as it sounds very authentic and integrated into the mix. Quirq’s way of composing (first the melody, then the chords to fit) makes the whole very tight, with the guitar parts driving the song and not just a loose improvisation over some pre-recorded chords.
Conclusion
This month we’ve been a little late, but paraphrasing a known book character: “a feature is never late, nor is it early, it arrives precisely when it means to”.As usual, the emails crossed with Quirq dealt with the human and the divine, a lot of stuff among which we managed to insert some music talking too. It’s been a pleasure to email him, though not so to edit him: there was a lot of stuff taken out for space’s sake that should have been here too. Even so, I hope what’s here is enough to know him better and appreciate his music.
Next installment: Atte André Jensen, AKA Modlys, creator of electronic music and jazz professor. Find how these two things match in January’s installment of “FLOSS your music”!
