Qasim Naqvi (Dawn of Midi) returns this week with a new track entitled “Onna at Pulse.” The cut is off his upcoming EP “Beta” due out on Erased Tapes. The upcoming four-track effort, due out as a physical release on June 20th for the first-ever Love Record Stores Day and digitally on July 3rd for Bandcamp’s Artist Appreciation Day, is considered by the artist to be a “prequel” to his 2019 modular-synth suite Teenages. The musician explains:
“At the time I had the most basic elements of a modular synthesizer- one oscillator and a random voltage generator which is a module that releases sporadic currents through the system. Ironically, this component provided a lot of warmth and humanness to the music, a kind of fallibility. I fed simple melodic ideas and rhythmic patterns into this bare-bones setup and observed the responses, while occasionally guiding the music in other directions. It was like a diagnostic test. At the time I felt that this music was underdeveloped but listening back, I think the Beta tracks add an interesting dimension to the entire Teenages arc. They’re the zygotes.“
“Onna at Pulse” exudes an amniotic calm. Pulsing to life with deep bassy resonance, a melody soon emerges cohering with a seemingly organic desire for evolving complexity. While these initial experiments might have seemed underdeveloped from the physical plane, closer listen does reveal that a track like “Onna at Pulse” is from a different dimension. Like listening to first natal stirrings, this track’s stepping melody and soft stirring rhythmic charge have a fluid calm until the coming rigors of birth seem to pressurize the melody into brittle, narrow bursts of sputtering energy.
