QOA is Nina Corti, a Buenos Aires sound and visual artist, as well as a fixture of Argentina’s experimental scene. Collaging field recordings, drones, live sampling and spoken word, they craft expanded listening experiences that attune you to the space around and within.
Emotional alchemy and intentional frequencies. Subtle harmonics and electronic textures blur in ‘Nagori’, an invitation to cross gently into the threshold states between dreams, waking and reverie.
Dreamstate Ambient
Calming Resonance
Altered States
Sources artists on influences, creative roots, inspirations, rituals and their releases on the label.
Words by: Jamie Collins-Adams
We’re on a call thousands of miles apart from each other, when Qoa notes how sound transforms any environment it enters; “Your voice is really here in my space, and my voice is really there in your space. We are moving the particles around us, even though we are on different continents.” This approach to sound embodies so much of the artist’s philosophy, one that feels as much about observation and presence as it does production.
After a car crash at fifteen left them unable to play the piano (which they had studied since the age of seven), the artist’s sonic journey led to the discovery that virtuosity and beauty are not the same errand. “What saved me was the drone and the looping.” The EP, ‘Nagori’ is full of melodic little flutters that feel embellished with harmonic resonance, the simplicity Qoa alludes to, that stay long after the note has faded. The name nagori (名残) is the Japanese word for what lingers after something has gone, a trace or afterglow, the last of a season. ⬤
“You don’t need to be a master at playing very difficult stuff. I can still reach a sound I want through very simple things. And there I went simple, simple, until the drone.”
“I had this feeling in mind of music that leaves space for your own space of listening. One that leaves space for other sounds to be part of the mix, the sounds of each person who is listening.”
Headroom is a mixing term, the space you leave so that sound has somewhere to move. Qoa uses it for everything. “Even our life in cities, when people are stressed, it’s also a matter of headroom. How much headroom do you have?”
According to the musician, what makes cities sound intolerable isn’t so much volume, “it’s a floor of noise that we get used to as normal. And it’s not normal.” A thriving forest is also loud, but “all these sounds will be listening to each other. They will be in conversation.” As opposed to that, the smashing of construction sounds, traffic and noise of urban environments has no call or response. “The construction is not listening to you. That’s why it’s invasive.”
The record is built to listen back. There are no vocals on it, deliberately. “Instrumental music leaves space for people to add their voice. Not music that occupies all the space, but that leaves space for other sounds to be part of the mix, the sounds of each person who is listening.” The sounds of your room are in the arrangement, as part of the composer’s design. ⬤
The theme of ‘Nagori’ is the doorway most of us cross twice a day without noticing: the stretch between being awake and asleep. “This intermediate state before entering the oneiric world,” Qoa calls it, “how this state could be a gradient of states.” Not a specific threshold one steps over, rather a longer slope with a great deal happening on it.
The drone is almost the perfect vehicle for this because of what it does to time. Qoa has always been “obsessed with loops, and what a loop can do”, a tone running long enough that you lose the thread, a Balinese cycle in which “the end of the loop is the beginning,” so that nothing announces itself as starting, you are simply already inside it. ⬤
“When you open yourself to listen to what’s around you, you give space to what is inside you to rise to the surface.”
Qoa travels everywhere with a recorder; this December they will be recording whales off the coast of Chile. Having studied electronic arts rather than music, they approach a place like a researcher, taking material traces from rocks and rivers, wiring branches with microphones until whatever was already there has become an instrument. Nothing is settled in advance, “it’s slowly developing, but I trust I have the image.”
Experiments are set running, then left to do what they will. On a different song entirely, one they’re still mixing now, a friend downstairs laughed loudly in the middle of a take. “I tried to mix it out and couldn’t. It’s just part of the mix now. At that moment they weren’t a close friend, and now they are, so it makes sense that you’re in my song with your laugh.” ⬤
Qoa is Nina Corti, a Buenos Aires sound and visual artist and a fixture of Argentina’s experimental scene. Qoa is Quechua for a mythological Andean wild cat, and for “that which transforms into something else”, which is what their work does, collaging field recordings, drones, live sampling and spoken word into extended states of listening.
With releases on Belgium’s Kraak Records, Sweden’s Fluere Tapes and LA’s Leaving Records, they craft expanded listening experiences that invite listeners to attune to both the surrounding environment and their own inner landscapes, entering a floating sense of space and time.