There’s a new album on the way from extraordinary percussionist and composer Qasim Naqvi, who first conquered our ears as one-third of longtime favourite avant-jazz band Dawn Of Midi. Entitled Teenages, the forthcoming album marks his first non-soundtrack release, following an array of compositional work for film, dance, theatre, chamber ensembles, and much more. Naqvi explains:

“My past releases like Chronology, Preamble, Fjoloy, and Film were made to accompany visual mediums. The music was always written to enhance another form. Teenages is the first album with its own motivating force. It’s a live multi movement work that I recorded for myself.”

Teenages was brought to life using an analog modular synthesizer built by himself over the course of two years. He had this to say about it:

“I’ve always been drawn to the power of un-amplified acoustic music. And for me modular synthesizers are a natural progression forward from the acoustic realm into the electric. 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.

Even though this is ‘electronic music,’ I didn’t want to rely heavily on a computer with an array of plugins, loops and samples, or exhaustive editing as part of the writing process. I wanted to treat this work like a live piece of music and have the natural behaviour of the machine shine through and sound huge, like an orchestra of electrical signals.”

We’ll have to wait until May 3rd for Teenages to drop through Erased Tapes, but we can already hear a magnificent first cut from it called ‘No Tongue’. Take a listen now.