Today we’re listening to Quintelium, an American ambient music composer. Born and raised in California’s Central Valley, he started making music in GarageBand in the late 2010s. He’s focused on ambient music, which he considers “music as nature.” Since 2022 he’s put out three LPs, of which we’re playing two. Dream and Reality, from August 2024, has winding synth loops occasionally mixed with field recordings. It’s a low-key record that nonetheless induces an atmosphere of profundity. We’re also playing his 2022 LP, Memory Horizon, whose tracks including two “devotionals” go longer-form. A conversation with Quintelium follows the streaming links.

Dream and Reality - Quintelium (64m, some lyricless vocals)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Bandcamp / Tidal

Memory Horizon - Quintelium (46m, no vocals)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Bandcamp / Tidal

What's your earliest memory of music?

I think it was at my Aunt’s house when I was a kid in the ‘80s, hearing her play John Lennon’s “Watching the Wheels” on her record player. The combination of his voice and the slapback echo effect on it was dreamlike to me and still is.

Tell us about the path to making your own music.

I’ve been a big music listener for a long time, and I always thought I would be talented at making ambient music. For a long time, I thought I was a listener, but maybe not an artist type. I thought I would need an expensive home studio with walls of keyboards. In 2018, I started taking a look at GarageBand on my phone, and found out it had synths and other sounds I’d have thought were only available as hardware. I guess I was just completely ignorant about digital music production. But that was the start, and it wasn’t until about mid-2021 that I started making stuff that sounded worth releasing. And it kind of snowballed from then on.

How'd you get into ambient music?

When I first learned that ambient was a type of music, it felt like something I had always known existed anyway, somehow. I like the flowing quality a lot of ambient and drone has to it. It’s music as nature, and like nature there’s a spiritual quality to it.

Dream and Reality was recorded in the Central Valley of California. How did this environment affect the album?

I was born here, but I’m not sure how much it influenced what I made. It probably did a little subconsciously, at least. There’s a place out in the country where I used to live that has empty fields that sort of stretch out to the horizon, and I’ve wondered if I could go out there and compose music on my iPad and see how that would turn out, but I haven’t done that yet.

Tell us about your studio setup.

Well, as I’ve said, I don’t really have a studio, but I’ve gone from iPhone to iPad at least. I have a little bit of hardware at this point. I have a MicroFreak, a Drumbrute Impact, and a Keystep 37 (all by Arturia), so it’s a start. Dream and Reality was done mostly in Logic Pro with a lot of plugins. I really love BLEASS Delay and Fugue Machine, and I only used them on a couple tracks on the album, but I think I could make a whole album using them on every track.

How do you discover new music these days? Any notable recent discoveries?

I follow of a lot of people on Twitter and Bluesky who give great recommendations (record collectors, fellow artists, and critics), I read The Wire, I check the daily reviews on Pitchfork, I see what’s going on at Aquarium Drunkard, I usually check Allmusic on Fridays. Oh, and Mojo and Uncut are great, and I’m glad they’re still in print.

During the past year and a half I’ve been slowly listening to the catalog of the Music From Memory label. Their two Virtual Dreams compilations have been really inspiring lately, and I want to incorporate a bit of the approach found on there to my own music, maybe.

Name an underrated artist from the past 50 years.

This is hard, but maybe Michael Head, the songwriter from Liverpool who was in The Pale Fountains, Shack, and now Michael Head and the Red Elastic Band. He has many fans and critics singing his praises, but he still seems under-known.

If you’re looking for an ambient artist, everyone knows the greatness of Stars of the Lid, of course (and the biggest influence on my music so far), but I think …And Their Refinement of the Decline is still somehow sort of underrated. I think it’s a monumental ambient album.

Also Cecil Taylor should be considered on the same level as Miles and Coltrane and Ornette Coleman all the rest, if he isn’t already.

What are you working on next?

I have two albums ready to go right now: one is made up of roughly mixed demos that I think are worth releasing (I got encouragement from William Basinski on Bluesky, so I took that as a sign that I must release them), and the other is a companion of sorts to Dream and Reality that I plan on releasing digitally.

After that, I want to do something that is rhythmic, abrasive, and weird. I’m not quite sure what it will sound like apart from that, but I want it to be different from what I’ve done so far. Right now I’m figuring out Strokes Audio Workstation and Stacks Granular Looper. I think they’re going to be a big part of whatever I do next.