I like to think of Qua aka Cornel Wilczek as more than a songwriter, producer or musician; I think this unique artist manages to present something closer to an aural painting rather than a set of songs. If that's a fair observation it's only fitting that his new album should be called Painting Monsters On Clouds. I'm looking at the inner sleeve, which features beautiful illustrations by Hunch, and I'm noticing the type of acts Qua has chosen to thank; like-minded genre-defying artists like Architecture In Helsinki, Machine Translations and Pretty Boy Crossover to name a few. Like those acts, Qua surgically dissects traditional sounds with the use of digital technology, sometimes bordering on glitch but ensuring an ambient result by infusing every song with his obvious love of dreamy atmos. The cluttered brilliance of Devil Eyes is as compelling as an instrumental can get. It's simple bed of bass and acoustic guitar is like the bare canvas which is then decorated with confident strokes of digital hues - loops and abrasive textures - that create a confusing but alluring result. Wilczek must consider the most beautiful music to be flawed in some way because the more fluid moments of Painting Monsters On Clouds are usually short-lived, being deformed by an unnerving element that exposes a love of top-end glitchy sounds, even if they're simply 'pops' or static. Don't be frightened by technology; as long as artists like Qua exist, you can be safely assured that digital trickery will be absorbed into a psyche that thrives on creating a soothing result. At the halfway mark of 2004, Painting Monsters On Clouds takes the honours for the year's most beautiful album.

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Tracklisting
1 Painting Monsters
2 On Clouds
3 Bounced
4 Eyes That Pierce
5 Night Sailing
6 Watercolour
7 Stranger Comforts Have Slipped By
8 Happy Domestika
9 Hanging Fruit
10 Output
11 It Was The Space Between Us

Full listing of QUA releases