Quadratic function
A local duo reinvents live electronic music.
Iceland’s biggest export (ash clouds notwithstanding), Björk has always been one to disrupt musical conventions. Recently, an interactive, computerized surface called Reactable has popped up in her live shows. The table interface uses tiles called tangibles, whose movements correspond to tempo and sound.
Colin Harris, a computer programmer for Groupon by day, has invented a similar device of his own. In the early aughties, Harris and Chris Widman, two Kansas City, Missouri, natives, moved to Chicago and started making blistering techno and dubstep together as Quadratic. Thanks to Harris’s machine, the duo’s live shows, like the one scheduled for Abbey Pub Saturday 8, are unlike any other in the city.
“Right now, I’m using [the tiles] to represent knobs so I can control two or more things at the same time,” Harris, the more reserved of the two, says of the machine’s ability to manipulate different parts of their tracks on the fly. “It just makes things a lot more flexible.”
We meet Harris and Widman—and their contraption—amid plants, records, CDs, studio equipment and two lurking felines. They share a cozy two-story Ravenswood home with Harris’s wife, Kim Schlechter (also the duo’s publicist). Watching the device—a small, tripod-mounted camera attached to a mini computer that tracks the tiles’ movements—it’s hard to believe it can be an instrument. Of course, electronic music has never adhered to a bass-drums-guitar framework.
Widman, 33, a DJ since his days at the University of Missouri, has hosted a radio show called Abstract Science since 1997, which he brought to Loyola’s WLUW when he moved here in 2000; it broadcasts Thursdays at 10pm on 88.7 FM. While still in Kansas City, Harris, now 31, became a regular listener and started attending Widman’s DJ gigs, eventually sharing some of his early productions.
“Colin was working with tunes in FruityLoops,” Widman says, “and he would come over sometimes and I’d be like—” “Wrong. Wrong,” Harris butts in. “That’s all wrong. Change that!” Widman laughs, then observes, “It took us a while to figure out the proper balance of our working relationship. A long time.” High-profile opening gigs for artists like Ninja Tune’s Daedelus and Hyperdub’s Kode9 prove the housemates have successfully navigated the nuances of studio cohabitation.
While Quadratic productions have an undeniable techno influence, they share qualities with dubstep and its myriad subgenres, which, as much as Harris’s invention, makes the pair electronic-music innovators. “I deejay a lot of different styles,” Widman says. A local club staple, he recently became a Smart Bar resident for its weekly Thursday-night bass-music parties. “If it’s a house-music night I’ll play house, or if it’s a minimal-techno show I’ll go that route, but when we make music I don’t think it’s very easy to classify or categorize.”
“People are trained to certain sonic cues,” Harris says. “So when a dubstep song does this, I know what’s going to happen,” he adds, mimicking dubstep’s telltale bass rumble. “If you don’t have certain elements of that common language, people are utterly confused, which we also enjoy, but sometimes you want people to dance, too.”
Given Quadratic’s hard-to-define sound, shopping demos has been a challenge. “We might have four songs that we could send to a dubstep label and then three songs that are basically straight-up techno,” Widman says. “The main thing we’ve been struggling with is that we have a lot of good material, but what do we do with it and where do we go?”
With a new generation of club kids storming dance floors all over the city, the two hope to impart to them some of electronica’s history. “When I first started going to raves, you’d hear everything,” Widman says. “You’d get exposed to all these different types of music. It was a complete package.” Which neatly sums up Quadratic.
Quadratic opens for Blockhead at Abbey Pub Saturday 8.
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