Isolated Field Recording Series: QUALIATIK - SHARDS:PROPRIOCEPTION

ISSUE is pleased to stream SHARDS:PROPRIOCEPTION, a new recording and accompanying visual project by multimedia artist, producer, performer, and engineer QUALIATIK. The piece is part of the Isolated Field Recording Series, commissioning artists to produce field recordings to be streamed over the course of this challenging and isolated time.

SHARDS:PROPRIOCEPTION presents an experience of embodiment during a time of disconnection. SHARDS is an expansive sonic wilderness, both disorienting and meditatively placid: an open-world kinetosphere reaching at once in all directions. The viewer wanders alongside the artist through the frenetic eyes of the camera, uncovering new settings as the video progresses and unfolds in real time.

Intimate and unfiltered, SHARDS offers a respite, a therapeutic escape into what reads as an alternate timeline, a post-COVID-19 landscape that feels empty, explorable, and abandoned. Amidst the fragmented, rusted shards of outer NYC, the piece finds parallels between the already-existing elements of decay constantly present within the city’s urban landscape, further exaggerated by the psychic corrosion of our current isolation. The piece explores the freedom in this solitude and develops a first-person connection with the artist as the viewer navigates the world through their eyes.

The void-like displacement of calm, spacious tones, sweeping atmospheres, and moaning vocals are cleaved by blows of dissonance, brash echoes of low-fidelity recordings from excursions through urban ruin amidst quarantine silence. Sonically situated in the eerily deserted streets of a pandemic-ridden NYC, SHARDS is a sonic portrait of a consciousness, single or collective, floating through this alternate timeline. “Proprioception” refers to a sense of self-movement and body position in space. Throughout QUALIATIK’s urban freefall, the piece develops a hybrid sense of movement through a metaphysical isolation connecting with an empty urban landscape — an exchange of spiritual intimacy with absolute nothingness, through the debris of humankind and its resonating shards.

SHARDS:PROPRIOCEPTION represents a departure from form for QUALIATIK, whose music often builds itself around melodic structure. A proclivity for multilayered, emotionally dense soundscape always bleeds through in the very tone of their sound design, and can be seen clearly even in their DJ mixes. In a radio interview on CCTV Berlin, when asked about how their background in neuroscience informs their sound, QUALIATIK stated, “I think a lot about delving into the subconscious in a way that is sonic, and can be represented that way. It’s almost like scoring a film, where you have a video or a movie with a very specific atmosphere and environment, and the sound palette of the score is supposed to extend the feeling of being immersed in that space. Except in this case, the movie is the listener’s own psyche, or my own as I’m making the sound.”

The piece follows QUALIATIK’s recent EP Discarnate, a hybrid work that remains stalwartly abstract while also demonstrating their obvious affections for pop music and the ability for melody to draw out emotions entangled with a cast of shrouded characters—the eponymous “discarnate,” or “abstract, non-corporeal entities in the psyche that have a life of their own.” Sound, a medium with distinct and measurable physics, but also one incongruently affected by our various psychological states, becomes a carrier signal that QUALIATIK uses to encode their relationships to these characters. SHARDS:PROPRIOCEPTION walks a step even deeper into the rawness of this physics, extracting the freeform sound design and abstract compositional approach of previous work and stretching it out, far away from any semblance of songwriting—perhaps meeting the discarnate on their own terms. An exercise in pure atmospherics with the same, resolute core intention with which QUALIATIK approaches all of their work, the piece is another fleeting sonic glimpse between the physical signal of sound and the artist’s manipulation of it—music’s breakdown, its disintegration, its evocation, its sheer fervor.

QUALIATIK is a multimedia artist, producer, performer, and engineer traversing the liminal spaces between science, psychology, and metaphysics. Their feverishly introspective music pulls a thread from the subconscious and unravels its internal framework through a tapestry-of-sound approach. The result is a breakdown of defenses, launching the listener into a dauntless state of self-confrontation. Propelled by its emotional intensity, QUALIATIK’s work "addresses the traumatic collision between the material and the abstract, specifically how the anxiety of a body bound to form gives rise to other forms: forms that demand articulation in the wreckage between the psyche and embodiment.” The mutating, distortion-tinged sound design inflected with QUALIATIK's penchant for melody, whether it be introspective tonal progression or sugary earworm, creates a sound "both weighty in its subject matter and weightless in its production. The sounds don't take recognizable shape or form—the wheezing synth passages and abstract synthetics are alien and amorphous. They writhe chaotically. At the center of the maelstrom of metallic whirring, they offer otherworldly melodies—the effects are something like pop music captured on radio telescope from a cosmic source."

QUALIATIK is the co-founder of NYC-based label/collective UNSEELIE, and organizes frequent live events via Paracosm, their curatorial residency at Brooklyn DIY venue H0L0. At Paracosm, they feature varied DJs and touring live acts from across the world, even scouting an Argentinian experimental outfit in the subway, whom they later hosted for a performance at Paracosm. They have produced a long catalog of mixes, and are a resident at Rinse FM, serving a firm not of credibility to their vision as both an artist and tastemaker. Most recently, QUALIATIK collaborated with Machine Girl, Hurt Free Network (NYC), NeuroDungeon (ES), and Trance Nation (LA) to throw an IMVU-centered online festival, nu:CENOSIS, at which they hosted the likes of Arca and Total Freedom, Kamixlo, Swan Meat, and more on the UNSEELIE stage. QUALIATIK’s debut EP, Discarnate, was released in June 2019 via their own label, Psychoid Devices, along with an ambitious self-directed music video for the record’s single, “Mother Tongue.” The release was followed by a six-month, 50-show self-booked tour of Europe and Asia. QUALIATIK has a handful of upcoming releases in addition to an array of side endeavors.