Pakistani-American composer Qasim Naqvi is readying a debut LP for Erased Tapes entitled Teenages. The solo electronic outing is due out May 3rd and focuses on the musician’s work with a modular analog synthesizer that he spent two years building. The voltage-controlled sound generator is comprised of various modules acquired during the building of the instrument, and on Teenages Naqvi’s guidance allows the machine nearly autonomous creation.
While the musician is known for his work as percussionist in the experimental jazz-oriented trio Dawn of Midi, Naqvi’s past solo outings like Chronology, Preamble, Fjoloy, and Film were composed for various dance, theatre, film and installation-based projects. The composer explains that Teenages is his first album with “its own motivating force,” before going on to describe it as a “live multi-movement work that I recorded for myself.”
Discussing his work with the modular synthesizer, he explains that it is a natural progression from his interest in “un-amplified acoustic music.” He goes on to explain:
“It feels like an orchestra comprised of very unusual instruments, and their orchestration and vibrational properties lie in the patching and flow of voltages through a system. They’re also unstable and they rarely play the same thing twice in any exact way. It’s almost organic and human. It was really important for this album to capture that kind of uninterrupted behavior.”
It is exactly the machine’s unpredictable characteristics, its seemingly petulant ability to make its own choices, that led Naqvi to title the collection Teenages. On “No Tongue,” the composer guides the machine (or the machine guides the composer) from a field of primal drone into pastures of rippling arpeggiation. Here, the pattern seemingly gains its own complexity, evolving in its uniqueness with each sonic mutation.
