JQ & Richard Pike - Tessera (2025)
JQ (Joe Quirke) and Richard Pike have been collaborating for many years. Two-thirds of jazz-tinted new age trio Forgiveness and partner curators of UK’s Salmon Universe Records, they are constantly sharing ideas, music links, memes and share a conceptual crossover space.
‘Tessera’, is their first official duo recording. It explores the relationship between texture, frequency and impermanence in a singular way, a fleeting stream of sound materials that float in and out, that within seconds can appear present and even demanding of attention, yet fall away to some corner at the back of the room. There is a constant feeling of connection and disconnection, an ephemeral playfulness.
This is music that aims to be carefully sound-designed, infinite in detail but also transitory. A kind of deconstructed-dub ecology all their own. A tessera is a small piece of stone that makes up the larger whole of a mosaic. Or here a metaphor could be a colour-printed sheet in half-tones, a pattern made by cracks in a wall, or a visible trace of an earlier painting beneath. Echoes of echoes, sounds shared, resampled and small gestures repurposed to take on new meaning.
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'Tessera' will be the first ever vinyl release on their own label Salmon Universe.
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