Wednesday 19 February 2014

Qualchan - All My Friends Are Going Visceral


I'm generally OK at pub quizzes but one thing I'm really bad at is identifying tunes from brief extracts or intros.  That's probably why I struggle to identify anything that finds its way into Qualchan's All My Friends Are Going Visceral release.  Or maybe it's because he draws the whole thing together so brilliantly that you stop playing any guessing games within seconds and just let the magnificence of it wash over you.  Which is how it should be.

All My Friends Are Going Visceral is almost nineteen minutes of chopped up extracts and loops of all kinds of material: it feels like it shouldn't hang together at all well and that, in doing so, it defies some kind of musical logic.  That's a hugely liberating experience.  I've no idea whether Qualchan just piled it all up instinctively or whether he took weeks painstakingly stitching this veritable sonic patchwork quilt together.  If the first, then he possesses an astonishing level of artistic instinct; if the second, he is a brilliant musical craftsman.

It's probably a bit of both.  All My Friends Are Going Visceral is split over two 'sides', both around nine and a half minutes in length and the whole release is available as NYOP here.  You can hear 'Side A' in my February show on Dandelion Radio, streaming at various times during this month and discussions are underway hopefully for Qualchan to do something for the show in the near future.  Give this release a try, but leave your preconceptions somewhere else, because this is unlikely to be like anything you've heard anywhere else.

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