Qua

NICK DWYER

Have a warm welcome for a multi-talented man – a composer, producer, musician and sound designer, been working on a multitude of projects in Melbourne over recent years, playing in many different bands, Mr. Cornel Wilczek. [applause] Cornel, are you well?

QUA

I’m very good. [looks at clip mic] I’ve never worn one of these before. I’m good.

NICK DWYER

Excellent. Just to give people an idea, how long has music been a part of your life for?

QUA

Really long time. I think I started learning guitar when I was eight, and then once I left school studied jazz guitar at uni[versity]. Then strayed for a little bit, studied graphic design, then did a couple of years of that and thought, “What the hell am I doing?” And then slowly got into soundtracks and went to Media Arts at RMIT [Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology]. It’s a really interesting course, it’s based around quite a few different disciplines and looking at them in a fine arts context. So looking at film sound design as art as opposed to design. And through that met lots of people and started a career making sound.

NICK DWYER

Pretty much everyone in this room is either a producer in their own right or is tinkering around making music and a lot of people do know, but for some people it’s a word that comes up and it’d be nice to get a definition. What exactly is sound design and what does a sound designer do?

QUA

OK, a sound designer within a film context will look at using sound – not necessarily music, but sound to help with a narrative aspect of the film. So say, for example, you’re working on a scene with sync sounds that are dialogue, movement, footsteps and atmospheres and trying to get a balance that not only describes what’s happening but tells a lot more of the story, that can somehow add tension to a scene that needs to be tense, can offer a very abstract way of giving a bit of a history about a person and things like that.

There’s no one way of doing things and that’s the beautiful thing about sound design, that it’s a very lateral art form. And you can be very experimental with techniques and often get away with it in a very commercial context, which is excellent. It’s one if the few jobs that you can work commercially and have quite a lot of freedom and experimentation with.

NICK DWYER

For you growing up as young Cornel, loving music, playing guitar, at what point did the idea of sound design, and in particular was there a soundtrack that you checked out as a kid where all of a sudden you were like, “Oh my gosh, this has opened up a whole new world for me?”

QUA

Yeah, there were probably quite a few moments. I guess, one moment would be seeing Tron. I’ve got my Tron shoes on. That was incredible.

NICK DWYER

Who composed Tron?

QUA

That was Wendy Carlos who did the music. And actually a lot of the sound design came from Wendy Carlos’s music as well so a lot of the atmospheres and a lot of the non-musical elements came from Wendy Carlos’s synth treatment. So it was probably the first time I became aware of this aspect in film and then, you know, getting older, seeing so many more David Lynch films, for example, were a big eye-opener. Or ear-opener.

NICK DWYER

As you’ve progressed in this craft as a sound designer, do you find it a lot harder to enjoy films? Rather than just focusing on the story, you’re honing so much more in on the sound?

QUA

Yeah, studying was really hard. Like, you just couldn’t watch a film properly. Actually now it’s got to a point where I’m so tired of analyzing that I can actually watch films again, which is really nice.

And you know, a good sound design treatment will easily allow you to enjoy a film anyway because when you’re not thinking about technique and you’re just thinking about the film and the narrative itself, then it’s quite successful and they’ve done a great job and that happens a lot more these days.

NICK DWYER

For you, over the years, have there been any very disappointing moments where there’s been a film with great cinematography, great narrative, but you’ve just been like, “Man, the sound design was terrible”?

QUA

Yeah, there’s lots. I kind of wish a lot of sci-fi films treated sound design a little better. The obvious examples like the Star Wars recent things could have been fantastic but they weren’t. Yeah, yeah, lots. [laughs]

NICK DWYER

What would be another great introduction for everyone to not just your own productions but some of your work as [a sound designer]? Shall we watch “Devil Eyes”? Tell us about “Devil Eyes,” man, in particular Paul Robertson, who is a great friend of yours.

QUA

Paul Robertson is a Melbourne-based, I should say Geelong-based animator, who’s now becoming quite widely known and doing lots of film clips for different people, but we studied together. The thing about Media Arts is that it was a very cross-disciplinary course where animators were working with sound designers and that’s where I met quite a few bands that I’m currently working with. We just have a really interesting relationship where I just give him music and he gives me animation and we just are continually working. This piece is something from the last album I did under the name Qua, and Paul Robertson did this animation in about a month and it’s fucking insane.

(music and video: Qua – “Devil Eyes” / applause)

NICK DWYER

That’s pretty impressive. How long ago was that made?

QUA

That was 18 months ago now when the last album came out. I’d really like to do some more with Paul really soon.

NICK DWYER

So there was a video that he essentially made for you?

QUA

Yep, as a film clip.

NICK DWYER

Right, for anyone that was in the room earlier on, as we were just talking before this lecture, there’s another thing that you and Paul – which I wouldn’t mind showing a bit earlier on – it’s a pretty funny thing. There’s another little thing that you and Paul did and that was you doing music for him. So you’ve got a nice little healthy exchange going on?

QUA

Yeah, we’ve got a little symbiotic relationship that, if I have an idea, I’ll pass it on to him and vice versa. Often, when we’re working on animations he’ll start one scene and I’ll start another scene and then we just cross like that. It’s just really nice and I think the really important thing I’ve learned doing soundtracks and things like this over the past few years is just relationships are so important, and working with people that you get along with is one of the most productive things in the world.

NICK DWYER

Obviously it sounds like you and Paul have a really healthy symbiosis, but is it always an amazing thing for you seeing your music reinterpreted? When you created that track originally, was there an idea in your head of something else, I don’t know, you were perceiving and then to kind of see his take on it with that animation?

QUA

I had ideas but I didn’t want to express them to him and that’s not at all what I would have thought of. I think the first time I saw it I almost cried, it was just absolutely amazing and so sad. I’ve got certain friends that I really trust their interpretations a lot and I’m working with a few other animators now on some new things, which is just fantastic.

NICK DWYER

The Qua project is entirely you, pretty much? You do employ other musicians, but all of the music that we heard just before, are you playing everything on that?

QUA

That’s me playing everything, yeah. That’s not as typical. That’s a bit more acoustic, the other stuff is a little bit more electronic. But live I’ll work with quite a few different performers and musicians because it’s pretty hard to do live.

NICK DWYER

How long has the Qua project been going for and how was this thing known as Qua born?

QUA

When I moved to Melbourne from Adelaide in 2000 not having access to bands and I didn’t know anybody here, just had a computer and needed to keep making music. So it never was an intentional thing to do stuff by myself. But like I guess a lot of electronic producers that I know, who were working in bands and other formats beforehand, suddenly when you’re left to your own devices you suddenly make all this music and you’re like, “OK, here’s a solo project that I never intended to do.”

NICK DWYER

Going back to Adelaide, we’ve heard a little bit about Melbourne since we’ve been here. I’m sure a couple of people know a little bit about Sydney to a certain degree, but tell us about Adelaide as a city. You are born and bred in Adelaide?

QUA

Yep, yep, like a lot of Adelaideans [I’ve got] European parents but I’m first generation Australian. Lived in a very multicultural part of Australia, of Adelaide that is, and, yeah, it’s a pretty strange place. It’s a million people so its not actually that small but it feels like the smallest town in the world.

NICK DWYER

It’s quite a large urban spread though?

QUA

It’s about as big as Melbourne as far as the actual size goes but a quarter of the population and it feels very sparse. There’s been some interesting music in the past few years, but it has until probably recently been quite isolated. Bands like AC/DC and Cold Chisel and all that, Bon Scott and all those people are from Adelaide so it has had an interesting musical history.

NICK DWYER

Growing up as well – the feeling of isolation, we were talking before the lecture started about how Virgin came along and opened up a lot of things – but growing up in the ’90s, did a lot of the cities feel quite isolated from each other?

QUA

Oh, absolutely. That competitive thing that you feel because you don’t understand another culture, coming to Melbourne and going to raves and big parties and just being so overwhelmed and feeling quite conscious. And just really hating the position in Adelaide because we felt so isolated. But sure enough, you find out the more you travel that it’s just like any other city, and that competitive streak between cities in Australia pretty much dissolved once cheap flights became available and everybody started working with one another. Which was always there to an extent, but as young electronic performers we couldn’t really meet other people from other cities, we weren’t able to work like that.

NICK DWYER

When you were in Adelaide prior to coming to Melbourne, what were your first forays into music production sounding like and was there much support for it in Adelaide?

QUA

No, there wasn’t too much. The first thing I really did there was work with the Contemporary Arts Centre of South Australia and set up a few experimental sound design installations. It didn’t go down too well. I remember an opening I did where I had a lot of long-term patrons to the gallery coming in and saying, “What the fuck is this? Sound does not belong in a gallery space.” It was just really quite depressing. Saying that, it generated a lot of interest and I met a lot of really amazing sound artists from it. And then we all moved to Melbourne.

NICK DWYER

[laughs] You were also saying that within Adelaide, those artists that were doing electronic music, there wasn’t much of a sense of camaraderie, it was quite the opposite to a certain degree?

QUA

It was just very competitive. Not really knowing what was happening in the rest of the world and feeling so isolated. If you bought a piece of equipment, had a computer, you were really precious about it. You got really pissed off when you saw someone else with a piece of gear as well. I think that happens in a lot of cities, especially when you’re quite young and naïve to a lot of things. Then I moved to Melbourne and was quite impressed with how embracing and friendly – especially the experimental and avant-garde music scene, which is generally the most pretentious in any city – was just so beautiful here, and quite inviting and welcoming.

NICK DWYER

Tell us a bit more about this. What year was it that you first arrived here and what musical treats awaited you?

QUA

I moved here in 2000 and actually the biggest thing that drew me here was a record store called Synaesthesia, I’m not sure if anybody’s aware of that.

NICK DWYER

It’s still there now?

QUA

Yep, yep, Synaesthesia is in the city. It was just a hub for… Anybody that made or liked music would go there. And Mark, who owns it, did lots of distribution and also has his own label and put on performances in the store as well and that was just… This is when I was really getting into the more experimental side of things and I was just overwhelmed by this community that seemed to exist really well and everybody was releasing albums and playing regularly. It just seemed like the place to be.

NICK DWYER

When you talk about the experimental stuff that you were feeling a lot of the time, internationally, what was getting a lot of play from you on your stereo?

QUA

I came from a bit of a free-jazz background and stuff like that. As far as experimental stuff, a lot of the musique concrète artists. Contemporary stuff, I was personally into experimental meeting pop, so a lot of the whole ’90s German [scene], like Mouse on Mars and things like that. And especially Japanese, I got very into the Japanese music scene, like Nobukazu Takemura and people like that, was just amazing. Everything I’d wanted to hear.

NICK DWYER

So did you move to Melbourne basically to be in a new environment or did the RMIT thing play a large part in your decision to move here?

QUA

That played a massive role. It was between hanging out in Synaesthesia, the record store and finding out about Media Arts as a course, and realizing there was another collective there that was based around education, having quite amazing lecturers like Hilsa Matsis, who was another musician who I was playing a lot with at the time and happened to be a lecturer there. And Philip Brophy, who is a filmmaker and composer as well, who I was actually big fans of before I started the course. Having them as mentors really meant a lot.

NICK DWYER

And then all of a sudden, you talk about a great sense of community starting to come out of RMIT. You talked about Paul just before, but who else was in this RMIT community who have gone on to do great things in music?

QUA

Well, my closest friends there were the guys in Architecture in Helsinki and we all worked together originally, and then there’s other bands like Music vs. Physics, who are hip-hop. It was just basically all genres of music were born out of this. A lot of amazing experimental artists as well and then we met people from other institutions, like Anthony Pateras, who was at VCA at the time, and Robin Fox, who are now living and working and doing lots of interesting stuff overseas.

God, just so many people have now gone on to do stuff, not just in sound but also in film as well. Through all my film and soundtrack work I think I’ve met at last in any one project someone that has been through the Media Arts process and they are usually the people I can relate to and really connect with.

NICK DWYER

From the get-go with all of your musical projects, have you strongly believed that it should be accompanied by a visual aspect? Just how important is that visual side, do you believe, for music?

QUA

Actually, I don’t think it’s that important, but when it's done well it’s just amazingly entertaining and I just happen to have lot of friends who work in that field. I don’t think it has to always fit together. I know a lot of people are like, “I can’t perform without a VJ,” and I know that’s sometimes a little bit sad. But when you get that relationship really working, especially when you’re a laptop musician or whatever, it’s really nice to have something else to focus on because it’s not that exciting sometimes having people stare at you while you’re pressing buttons.

NICK DWYER

The other day with Paul Kelly and Declan Kelly we heard one track from Architecture in Helsinki, but this is a Melbourne-based band that have gone on and are reaching some quite nice, lofty heights at the moment. Shall we hear a track from them and maybe it’ll be good to play a couple more bits of Melbourne music.

QUA

Yeah, alright, I’ll play some Architecture in Helsinki.

NICK DWYER

And also, explain a little more what your role in the band is?

QUA

Um. General random hanger-on-erer? They work on my stuff, I work on their stuff. I do some writing with Cameron, the main songwriter, we also do a lot of recording, borrow each other’s gear. I mix their stuff and master their stuff and they mix my stuff and master my stuff. I’m just as much part of it, but not actually touring with them.

NICK DWYER

They’re on tour at the moment, aren’t they?

QUA

Yeah, they’re on tour in the US. I’ll play, um. What shall I play? I’ll play this.

(music: Architecture in Helsinki - “Wishbone” / applause)

NICK DWYER

So tell us a little bit more about the Qua project, which has obviously off the back of the success of that project, pretty much changed many aspects of your whole life. When did the Qua project start taking fruition and what was it with that project that you were musically trying to achieve?

QUA

I never really had any real direction with it except that as I was running through the course of Media Arts I realized that I had this compilation of music, and when I put it all together it worked as whole and just ended up getting a record deal in Australia through Surgery Records. And without ever intending to release any music it started doing quite well and managed to get album of the week on most radio stations. And then it got licensed in Japan, just randomly, and I had no idea at the time how it happened. Before I knew it, I was playing quite regularly in Japan and traveling in Japan a lot and working on lots of Japanese productions and stuff like that. And realized I had a bigger fanbase over there!

NICK DWYER

Tell us a little bit about the label it was released on, and for you it sounds like it was a label close to your heart.

QUA

Yeah it’s a magazine called Headz, and they ran a magazine called Fader by Headz in Japan. I had every one of their albums and never thought twice about contacting them to get my stuff released on there. It’s mostly post-rock and experimental stuff, a lot of the Chicago-based post-rock scene, like Tortoise and things like that, and Jim O’Rourke and Fennesz and then Nobukazu Takemura. It’s all my favorite artists and suddenly I’ve got an album there, and touring… It’s just insane.

NICK DWYER

When you talk about you being over there for production, what’s this all about my friend?

QUA

I think one thing that I didn’t expect but quite happy it happened was just through releasing albums, I think a lot of my stuff has a kind of cinematic feel. it does lend itself to soundtrack very well, and by default got lots of soundtrack work, for film and TV.

NICK DWYER

For Japanese film and TV?

QUA

Yeah, yeah. And also just I think a lot of people happened to like the sound of my album as well and I ended up doing production for a few bands, I’ve been working quite closely with a Japanese band called Meow. It’s just stuff that happens when you release an album and have different people interpret it and see how useful it can be to them.

NICK DWYER

But I mean the Japanese thing, it’s kind of like, I don’t know, you release your first album and the next thing, it’s kind of like a dream come true. Was that pushed at all by yourself or was it a freak accident?

QUA

It was a freak accident. I never tried. I mean I’ve always wanted to spend a lot of time in Japan, I’ve always been fascinated with Japanese art and music, but it was never intentional. I’d still love to be bigger here and doing more stuff here but it just so happens that, yeah, I can do that in Japan quite easily now.

NICK DWYER

You mentioned before with the first Qua album, you were getting album of the week on Australian radio stations. Is there support for Australian music on local television and radio, or are there fundamental flaws going on in the foundation?

QUA

I think radio is really good in Australia. it could be better, there could be more stations, more options, but I think it’s fairly supportive. Every city has at least one good radio station, Melbourne happens to have two really good radio stations. It is really supportive where my album, there’s ten minute periods where there’s lots of digital noise, it can get played on the radio aside bands like Architecture in Helsinki. It’s just amazing. I was quite blown away and didn’t realize I had that much support. And television is quite amazing too. There’s some really interesting people placed in music licensing and TV. You’ll find really great bands in Australia, and electronic artists have had tracks licensed to TV shows and commercials and the love has been spread, and people are making money from this now. It’s really quite, not as supportive as it could be, but healthy more than one would expect.

NICK DWYER

How about the government? There are a lot of nations where the government actually gets behind supporting bands going overseas, all kinds of music grants. Is that happening in Australia?

QUA

I guess there isn’t as much as a lot of other countries, it’s still something you really have to slave away at. If you’re willing to spend the energy and put the time into getting grants and really pushing the whole funding aspect, you really can do quite well and there are a lot of bands that are like that here, but it does become a full-time job very quickly and I’ve never had the patience to do that. Which is unfortunate because there’s been some great opportunities in the past that usually just slip by a lot of really amazing artists’ fingers, but saying that, there are some people taking really good advantage of that right now.

NICK DWYER

Shall we hear something off your first album? Tell us about this album, what was happening in your life at that moment?

QUA

I was coming to terms with my environment and trying to meet people and do stuff and trying to survive financially and all that sort of stuff. And I felt quite isolated, but was really having fun discovering this environment and discovering the way I made music.

NICK DWYER

Music, more often than not, is a by-product of your environment. For a lot of people, does this album sound Melbourne?

QUA

Maybe it does, I can’t think of other things that sounded similar at the time, but to me it’s very much that place that I was living in at this time and it has a sense of discovery that I was feeling. Whether it sounds Melbourne, I don’t really know. It’s a really interesting question and I don’t know what the Melbourne aesthetic really is, but it tends to be probably a little more happy to experiment. So I’ll play something. This is something off the first album.

(music: Qua – “Monkey Sleep”)

NICK DWYER

That’s beautiful, man. How old is all this material now?

QUA

Oh, this was 2001, and a lot of this was done in about two weeks.

NICK DWYER

Can you run us through the process of how was each individual track attacked?

QUA

They were all done quite differently but, for example, that track, it began as a bit of a sound design piece so I was doing lots of field recordings. And this is often a method I use when I run out of ideas and don’t know how to construct things. I just do lots of field recording and work very collage-based and then start layering things on top and then pulling out that skeleton of sound design and seeing how it holds up. You often get really interesting and different arrangements that you usually wouldn’t think of.

NICK DWYER

If we listened very closely to that track, would we be able to hear the sound of… What kind of things?

QUA

Well, there’s not much left, which is really interesting! But what was there was, I live very close to a children’s farm and a lot of field recordings were based around a lot of those animals. And, what else? Stuff immediately in my environment.

NICK DWYER

So lay that all down and then build around that and then take away the original?

QUA

Yep, yep. That’s not how I do everything but that was a big part of things at the time and I still do now when I run out of ideas.

NICK DWYER

And subsequently what followed off the back of that was… For a lot of people it’s essentially a dream to be able to carve out a living based on purely making music, and some of whom have worked their way into very high positions, but all over the world a lot people are still struggling to make music. You’ve managed to carve out this whole new niche of being able to every day make music in one way shape or another and to live off that. Now, prior to this album had you been doing any film projects before or it all came off [the back of the album]? Obviously it was something you’d always wanted to do…

QUA

The only film projects I’d worked on were things based around my studies. I desperately wanted to get into film and TV and all that but, you know, it’s just really hard. Especially here when there are only a few opportunities, there’s only X amount of films produced each year, that’s a lot less than a lot of other countries, and it just seemed like an impossible thing to do.

But to find out that releasing an album was the best thing I could do to get film work was really surprising and just purely off the back of that got approached, primarily by directors who had bought the album and heard some sort of narrative quality in a lot of the tunes. And when they found out that I could actually write music, score for an orchestra and stuff like that, it became a really handy feature. So, yeah.

NICK DWYER

What were some of the first projects that you were approached to do? And how were those first projects, going from essentially retaining pretty much complete creative control over what you’re doing, and all of a sudden, maybe there’s a bit of a shift there?

QUA

For some strange reason, I don’t know why I’m involved so much in animation but I am and I love it. But it started with a lot of animators and animation is a very labor-intensive process, as anybody knows who’s worked in it, and I think animators really like that level of detail in music because they use that level of detail in their animation. It started with animation and I worked quite heavily with a Melbourne-based animator, Nick Kallincos, who has done some beautiful stop motion pieces and it started by getting things into lots of festivals around the world, and then from that I’ve been getting lots of TV commercials.

Lucky enough to have an agent approach me and saw the opportunities to put a lot of this more experimental stuff into TV commercials and I have to say that’s been really interesting because you often get a similar budget to a movie, but you’ve got 30 seconds and so you’ve got the opportunity to really get this 30 seconds right. And it can be the most frustrating experience in the world – and also really liberating because you’re working with so many people that have a piece of this, have some sort of ownership, whether it be the creatives from the advertising world or the director or the client. So it’s a really frustrating, yet really liberating thing to do because you can actually really do things to the Nth degree. And if you need to hire 20 people to play this piece, and you need to do it in this hall, you often can – you do have those budgets to work with, which is really nice.

So, as a result I advise anybody, I’m sure there’s the advertising aspect that a lot of people don’t agree with and I didn’t at first I was very reluctant to do it, but when I realized that this could actually benefit me making music…

NICK DWYER

Working with these kinds of budgets and say, for example, you feel you really do need to work with a 30-piece string section or whatever, have you been able to grow and learn a lot because you’re in this situation that as a bedroom producer or something you don’t get these opportunities?

QUA

Going from being a bedroom producer to suddenly working in these really amazing studios with 30 people behind you watching you mix and being in these really stressed-out situations and running the show, organizing all the musicians to come in, and suddenly I’m micing up all these instruments that I’ve never really done before. You know, I knew how to mic up a drum kit and I knew how to record bands but I’d never recorded big ensembles. I’d recorded a few instruments but… I couldn’t even find how to mic up on the net, it was really quite confusing.

But when you’re thrown in the deep end a lot of amazing things can happen. And, like I said, the experimental side of that was really quite amazing, what you can actually get away with. And I have to say, if anybody gets the opportunity to work in that field, do it, you can do some really interesting things.

NICK DWYER

Obviously it was a pretty lucky coincidence with what happened off the back of the album for you to get involved in this field, but just how hard is it and what would you say is the best way? There’s a lot of people in this room that are making music who would be very well-suited to that side of the industry. What is the best way to get out there? Or is it a pretty closed door? That whole advertising industry and film industry does seem like, not so much a boys’ club but it’s mates of mates of mates of mates who get the opportunities.

QUA

Oh, it is, and you often find when you look into the histories of certain artists that they’re often related to someone or there’s some kind of family connection or someone that’s invested into that has had an interest in their nephew or whatever. It is very closed, but I think the best advice I can give now is that it’s about building relationships. If you have people you really get along with and have a good working relationship with, you’ve just got to stick with that.

There are quite a few directors now that I’ve done their student films with who are now getting great opportunities and looking at doing feature films and finally getting people interested in them. It’s a beautiful thing because you’ve suddenly got these people that trust you and like what you do and you can do your own thing, as opposed to being given very tight briefs that don’t offer much freedom.

NICK DWYER

Have you got an example of an ad that we can watch now that you did?

QUA

Oh, man.

NICK DWYER

[laughs] Sorry to put you through this.

QUA

Let’s have a look. This is something that I wouldn’t tell too many people about. Look, I’ve done some things that aren’t necessarily aligned to some of the music that I do and then I’ve done a lot that are and, unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of my ads with me. But I’ve got a few things here. I mean, this is great, this is for Austar Broadband and…

NICK DWYER

And just before we see it, what was the brief that you were given from the client? So now we’ve got this ad, we want moody! We want edgy! How does it work?

QUA

Well, yeah, sometimes you get those types of briefs. This was a brief where they just said it’s about nerds, it’s got this particular narrative, they wanted really lonely music and they referenced stuff like the Carpenters that I really like. So this was great to have complete freedom to do whatever I wanted.

So I thought this was a great opportunity to do something that I’d never, ever, ever tried before and that is a big vocal, Beach Boys-esque harmonies over one of my favourite instruments, which is the French horn. I’d never been able to use it before and wanted to get it into something, so I managed to get a French horn and try something completely different. This was a great production exercise to me, and even though I’ll never write anything like this again, it’s a really good experience to see how you can introduce these kind of instruments into your own work.

(advert: Austar Broadband commercial / applause)

NICK DWYER

So in the light of that, how long did you work on it and did you find the right French hornist?

QUA

I ended up playing it myself with lots of editing. It was just great to actually try, and this is what I really do enjoy about doing things like this every now and again, is finding a genre and getting that genre right. And even though you might never, ever do that again, it can lend some really interesting production techniques. To get that right sound I realized I had to go to tape and had to use rooms as opposed to…

NICK DWYER

Oh, so you ended up recording it on tape…

QUA

No, I ended up bouncing things down. So, as an electronic musician suddenly being faced with a brief that requires a whole set of tools, it’s insane, it’s amazing. It did my head in, I didn’t sleep for a whole week trying out different things. A lot of experimentation and ringing around helps.

NICK DWYER

That raises a very interesting question, obviously. Anyone who’s in the business of releasing records, I mean, some people take a lot longer, but essentially there is a deadline, somewhere there [gestures down] or it might be in ten years’ time for others. But all of a sudden you’re thrust into an industry with the strictest deadlines known to man. How do you deal with those?

QUA

Not very well. You just have to do them, and it can be a bit overwhelming when you’ve got ten deadlines in a row. But I’ve learned a lot from it and that’s being very good at making decisions now and actually being able to listen to something and have an idea that’s very strong before I start something and work out an execution and knowing gear that I might need to use and not wasting time getting the wrong gear. Knowing what mics to use, knowing what pre-amps to use on a certain job, knowing what software to use even, you just streamline everything when you’re in these positions. The stress is really hard to work with but wow, now that I’ve got some of this knowledge, applying it to albums and producing other people’s music has been just amazing.

NICK DWYER

You’ve found yourself in some very stressful situations, how do you deal with stress?

QUA

I work through it. Yeah, I just like to work through it and keep going and don’t let it defeat me and I think that’s the best way to do it. There’s nothing worse than just thinking about it. There’s been a few times where I’ve been completely blank and it often happens when you’re being told to do your own thing, and especially when someone says, “I like your album, can you do something like that?” That can be the most stressful of all. In fact, “Dude, give me a brief, give me something to work with.” That can be really, really, really hard and the only way to deal with it is just to work through it. I think the moment that you give up and let things go you can just feel really down.

Obviously everybody here loves doing music and there’s nothing worse than being completely bankrupt with ideas and the only way to really get through it is just work through it and actually have some good peers and a good collective to bounce things off. I’ve got a few people who I’ll ring and say, “I need help, can you come down and just listen to something.” Without those people…

NICK DWYER

We were mentioning about the Academy and the whole sense of community and sharing music, sharing ideas. It sounds like off the back of the RMIT thing and all this, how important is this sense of community and nurturing a good community, having great people around you, for you?

QUA

Extremely important. For example, finishing Media Arts and, very similar to this experience, having an environment where you’re working with other composers and musicians all the time and having what we had regularly, reviews where we’d just sit down and play each other stuff and talk very casually about stuff. You don’t realize how important it is until you don’t have that and then suddenly you start to wonder what the worth is of your music and you just lose sight of the overall picture.

So the ability to bounce things off other people – and also listening to other people’s stuff, I feel very selfish sometimes when listening to other people’s music. It gives me ideas and I’ve got nothing to comment back and I’m just thinking, “I’m going to try that.” That’s a really important part for me, listening to other peoples’ logic. How do you construct things and why are you constructing it?

Those conversations are really, really important, and not just other musicians but people who I use as a bit of a peer group, filmmakers and animators and everything. And I think anybody in the creative profession can often give you some really good insight into your own work.

NICK DWYER

Going back to what is essentially your day job now with doing film and television commercials and the like, how does it affect you creatively with your music?

QUA

It gives me lots of great ideas, except I just don’t have enough time to work on it because when it’s on, it’s on. Soundtrack, as great as it is, it’s left last in the equation. So you’re often being faced with a week to work on something and they’ve got to get it out. Two weeks down the track it has to be pressed onto film and they’ve just forgotten about sound, basically. That happens in the biggest productions all the time, so when you’re working, you’re on, you’re switched on the whole time.

It’s affected my stuff dramatically because I haven’t had the time to do it, but it's just a matter of taking time out. You find most composers will work something like nine months on, three months off, and you just have to take that time off because there’s no relaxing. You’ll never get, “You’ve got three months to work on this, work on it in your own time.” It’s just never going to happen. You get a couple of days to show some sketches.

Besides that it’s creatively fantastic, it’s just being able to try very different things and work with budgets to actually find out why certain gear is so expensive and to find out why so many people use these mics. Just to know that from first-hand experience – as opposed to reading it in magazines or being told – is really great, because when you do need to use some of that stuff in the future, you can be quite quick and work out what you need and execute ideas a lot quicker.

NICK DWYER

Do you have to train yourself in becoming pretty adept at knowing when enough is enough? It doesn’t need any more layers, doesn’t need any more, just stop now...

QUA

Yeah, oh yeah. That comes from timing usually and someone saying, “I’m taking it away from you now,” because I would just continually work on things. I don’t know when to stop so it’s really nice to have other people in soundtrack to tell you when to stop.

NICK DWYER

You’ve generally got someone behind you to say, “You know what, Cornel? You’ve done enough.”

QUA

It’s usually my girlfriend saying, “Come to bed.” Or it will be the director or it will be my agent who books me all the work because there’s another job on or whatever.

NICK DWYER

You’ve been involved with a few feature-length films. How does the process of sound design for these films work? Are you given the film as a whole and you watch from start to finish, you get a vibe for it and then you start taping little bits?

QUA

I haven’t been lucky enough to be in that position where I’ve just been given a whole film and told, “Go for it.” My role has often been fixing up things and you find that, especially in Australia, that comfort and security behind someone that has done lots of films before is really important, so contractually they’ll align themselves to those people. These people don’t necessarily do all the music, which is really strange, and they often get lackeys like me to do parts. And that’s how you start, that’s pretty much how a lot of people start in the film industry by doing certain things.

NICK DWYER

Kind of the hip-hop equivalent of ghostwriting?

QUA

Yeah. Look, it’s like that and there are some classic examples that I’m not allowed to talk about, lots of strange politics, but it’s really interesting because you can work your whole life in film and never be credited for anything, which is really quite sad. But the best years have yet to come.

NICK DWYER

We played a little bit of your work with Paul Robertson before but do you want to play the Street Fighter thing? Tell us a little bit about this project.

QUA

I got a grant last year to work on a new animation with Paul and we didn’t really have… he just started.

NICK DWYER

What was the grant?

QUA

It was, um. I’ve got a terrible memory for these things, a Melbourne city initiative and it was part of something or other. I don’t know. I just do it, and I’ll take any opportunity to work with Paul, he’s quite amazing, and this piece, [we] had no idea how we would tackle it, but I decided to do something completely different.

I actually found something that’s closely aligned to my childhood roots, which was a very prog-rock soundtrack, all done by electronics, which was a lot of fun. And I wrote tunes and he animated to them and then he animated some things and I wrote to them, so yeah.

NICK DWYER

And this went in to take on a life of its own in the sense that once it had entered a few festivals it seems now that even some games companies are like, “Hey guys, we quite like what you’re doing there.”

QUA

Yeah, yeah. It just went out of control. It got onto the net and got a million downloads in a week and that’s pretty good for something that’s ten minutes and is quite a large file. Who knows how many there are now, but it just got everywhere and without ever entering things into festivals we got it into quite a few festivals. And from that now, quite a few game companies have been really interested in turning this into a game, which will be a project for next year. As far as how we’re going to tackle it or how I tackle it sonically, wow, I just have no idea but it’s going to be a lot of fun because it’s going to be quite a big project.

NICK DWYER

And when you talk about games companies you’re talking about the top tier of your Xbox, PlayStation.

QUA

Yeah, this is a PlayStation…

NICK DWYER

More phenomenal budgets to work with!

QUA

Wait and see! Look, at the end of the day, I hope they don’t hear me say this, but I’d do it for free. I love working with Paul, I just find it so entertaining.

(music and video: Cornel Wilczek and Paul Robertson – “Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006” / applause)

NICK DWYER

So with the approach to the music for that one, did you play those instruments yourself? Guitar solos and all?

QUA

It’s all programmed except for the guitar solos, that’s me. I love guitar solos. Yeah. I like playing with computers, but I mean, the guitar solo is one of my favorite things in the world.

NICK DWYER

Now we’ve had two Qua albums released so far and work, I do believe, has been underway for the third for quite a while now. I do believe you scrapped the project halfway?

QUA

Yeah, yeah. I had a new album last year and then started from scratch. I just felt like I’ve learned so much from my production in soundtrack that it was an opportunity to put some of that into my own music, which is pretty rare these days. And working with Mountains in the Sky and Architecture in Helsinki and Curse Ov Dialect and producing other peoples’ albums and doing a better job than my own, I thought it was going to be really fun to actually apply some of this to my new stuff.

NICK DWYER

And has anything been recorded so far?

QUA

Yeah, yeah, I’ve started recording. It’s a lot more uptempo and poppier than stuff in the past and I’m using a drummer live, which is Laurence Pike, who plays with Triosk and Flanger and we’re going to do a tour next year, which will be great, through Europe.

NICK DWYER

You’ve also brought a pretty nifty little toy. I think anyone who’s been up the front of the desks has seen this shiny little Lemur thing. Tell us about this, man, and can we get a little bit of a demonstration about how it works? It looks very pretty.

QUA

Sure, I’m just going to keep talking while I load some things…

NICK DWYER

So Lemur is a French company?

QUA

They’re called JazzMutant, [whispers] a terrible name, and it’s a multi-touch screen device. Something that’s always been important to me is playing live and with electronics I always felt things were a little bit… It was just really hard to be completely live and to be gestural, and coming from a musical background and playing lots of instruments, I’m actually really good at using my hands and fingers and really desperately wanted to have something a little bit more gestural and that could be manipulated a lot more.

I’d been looking around for ages and I’d tried different things, using a guitar synth live and all these things, and it hasn’t been that successful. But this is the first thing that I’ve found that can help me be really live and do very dramatic changes on the fly to arrangements and really look at constructing songs live and relying less on sequence-based stuff.

NICK DWYER

This thing has pretty much single-handedly revolutionized your life?

QUA

Oh, totally. I sleep with it. It’s just replaced a lot of hardware. I’ve still got a long way to go with working it out but I just really believe in interfaces that steer you more away from the computer and get you more hands-on. [inaudible question] It’s great if you have patches pre-made for you but to build patches takes a bit of time. I have a bit of a programming background as well so it’s fairly easy, but if you’ve got a friend that can help build patches for you, it’s fairly simple scripting languages. But there’s a bit of maths involved to actually be able to emulate certain things. But if you just want to trigger things and just send CC levels, it’s fairly easy. [inaudible question] Yeah, yeah, so I use it to run Ableton Live, Reaktor and Plogue Bidule. It’s fantastic.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

How’s the lack of tactile feedback, the fact that you can’t feel the controls, only see them?

QUA

It’s pretty strange, there’s no physical feedback but there’s lots of visual feedback, which you have to build in yourself. That’s the other thing, if you want some sort of visual response, you have to program some sort of flash or something to give you some external feedback.

You can also program it to take any output signals and to give you feedback from whatever you’re using as well, whether that be automation of faders or whatever. But that takes a bit of getting used to. But I can live with that.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Who is it made by?

QUA

They’re called JazzMutant. I’m not sure where they’re from in France but they’re very lovely guys. Quick for support and all that sort of stuff but I don’t really know too much about them.

NICK DWYER

How many of these do you think are in existence, is it a case of they produce a thousand or is it in the hundreds?

QUA

I gave a figure before but I think it could be wrong. I’m not really sure but it’s still a small start-up company. They just released this new operating system which now supports MIDI, because before it was just OSC, which would only really work for Macs and Reaktor. So now that it supports MIDI you can use it a hell of a lot more.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

When you perform live what do you use?

QUA

Now I’ll be using this. I use guitar, that’s the other thing, I do lots of live looping, lots of synths and occasionally work with a drummer as well and do lots of live looping so really constructing on the fly. But just using Ableton Live and Reaktor to do most of that.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Is that what you use to do the loops, Reaktor?

QUA

I’m using Ableton Live more and more now.

NICK DWYER

Any more questions for Cornel? Well, if you guys want to come up and have a look at this a bit closer and what have you and maybe have it explained a bit more at length, then I’m sure Cornel wouldn’t mind at all, he’s a lovely guy indeed. But right now can we have a very hearty thank-you very much to Cornel. [applause]