Photo credit: Kelly Michael Anderson
OQ
Cole Quamme wasn’t setting out to start a band when he began working on the music that would become the basis for OQ, his new project with Milwaukee songwriter Liam O’Brien. Quamme, the drummer for exploratory indie-rock ensemble The Fatty Acids, was planning to create a compilation around some of the weirder, world music inspired beats that he was recording on the side, and had hoped to round up a variety of local collaborators. Most of them flaked out, but O’Brien responded and took the project in directions Quamme never anticipated.
“When Cole gave me the beats, he gave me ideas for where he wanted the thematic direction of the project to go,” O’Brien says. “He really wanted it to be based on this concept of re-wilding, the idea of a future in which humans abandon the cities and cities become taken over by plants and humans learn to live again with nature.
“Cole originally wanted a bluegrass player,” O’Brien continues. “His music was influenced by this one style of music from Sierra Leone called bubu, so he wanted to do a project that was bubu-grass. I’m not a bluegrass player, but I have spent time in Ireland, and I’m really connected to Irish music and I play the tin whistle. So I ran with that instead.”
The resulting music on the duo’s debut EP Paradice 1 is like little else coming out of the city, or from outside of it, for that matter: a modernist, experimental Afro-Celtic fusion. There’s a little bit of the Talking Heads in the music’s polyrhythmic uplift, but O’Brien grounds each song in traditional Irish melodies continents removed from David Byrne’s world experiments.
“Every song has an original traditional song within it,” O’Brien says. “Some of them are from pretty well-known songs. I’m sure musicians from Irish traditional circles would recognize all of them. So I guess people who dig Irish traditional music are either really going to love or really hate this.”
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Recorded at Milwaukee’s Silver City Studios and mixed at April Base Studios in Eau Claire, the EP was a collaborative affair, with Josh Evert of The Fatty Acids lending synths and piano, Alex Heaton handling bass, Ivan Eisenberg playing banjo and more than a dozen musicians (including Caley Conway, Ian Olvera and Mike Noyce of Bon Iver) contributing vocals. Evert and Noyce also assisted in mixing the EP, which they shared on Bandcamp this week.
OQ’s music is also being showcased on the nascent streaming platform 37d03d (pronounced PEOPLE), founded by Justin Vernon and The National’s Bryce and Aaron Dessner. That website isn’t much to look at yet, but given OQ’s collaborative nature they’re a good fit for the platform, which promises to spotlight unique artist collaborations.
Quamme says he expects that collaborative spirit to carry through OQ’s future recordings. “By the weird process that this began, we found our own voice unexpectedly,” he says. “I think from there we know the sound now, which was a weird, hard-fought discovery, so I think we’re going to run with it.”
OQ play an EP release show Saturday, Jan. 26, at Company Brewing at 10 p.m. with NO/NO and Ruth B8r Ginsburg.
