QRTR - ONDAS

Been listening on-repeat to this album from the end of last year from QRTR, who apparently is Philadelphia-based artist Meagan Rodriguez.

What’s her sound? I guess I’d describe it as a bit of 90s IDM (sometimes Aphex, sometimes The Black Dog) sometimes, sometimes a bit like Grimes circa ‘Visions’, sometimes a bit like Sofia Kourtesis tech-house with a layering of vocals, sometimes shades of any number of recent of artists intermingling R&B, dance music and global urban sounds (pre-‘Lux’ Rosalia? Debby Friday? Sudan Archives? Lido Pimienta?).

If that doesn’t sound like it makes much sense, I agree. The implied whiplash of the stylistic diversity is greater in concept than in practice though, I think because the general vibe and compositional approach has a consistent throughline: dreamy, intricate, chromatically dense, percussively inventive.

It is also extremely me-coded, which information you can do with as you will.

Not sure what else to say, so check these:

Bruise:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lGt6c9b8Bo

Amber Glass:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkF8P1uYx1Q

Alegria:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkQA2mAj_Kk

ooh I like "Bruise" a lot! I'll check out the full album too

a friend for whom this is also very him-coded mentioned Kelly Lee Owens when I sent him Bruise

The album opener definitely reminds me of some other artists you've repped for recently Tim, some kind of micro-genre of breathy diaristic intimate singing, an emotional space that's somewhere in the vicinity of melancholic yearning, fragmented / shard-like production — though "Let's Get Used" just started and it's moving in a somewhat different, dancier direction

Alegria is fantastic. You can mostly ignore my previous post, it was really tied to the first track, which seems to be an outlier

Yeah I almost mentioned Kelly - sort of what she might have sounded like if she had spent more time pursuing the direction implied by her More Than A Woman cover alongside everything else she has in fact done.

I don’t think any of your posts above are incorrect! It just varies a lot from track to track.

Yes! Love this. I think i read about QRTR on some EOY list last year, enjoyed whatever I heard and then got distracted before remembering to note it down. Glad you started this thread Tim F

Her previous album (Infia Ad Nauseam) is really good too. Housier but with similar sound design.