You’d never know the source material of “Tanger at Night” is “resampled klezmer,” as the song’s composer, NQ, describes it. Unless, of course, you peer deep into the track’s dark, horror-cue intensity and recall that klezmer is the party music of a historically displaced people.
NQ is Cologne-based Nils Quak, whose “Tanger” is the latest “Single of the Week” over at luvsound.org/singles (MP3). The song opens with eerily shimmering chimes, pulsing like lights reflected on rough water, and slowly raises and lowers its intensity for upwards of four minutes, before fading out into an extended windswept denouement of chance noises.
Writes Quak of the piece’s construction:
“It’s a two bar klezmer loop i found on a flexi disc. I made a couple of versions of it and automated their levels with a lorenz attractor driven lfo. the outcoming piece was played back into my appartment and recorded with a cheap iphone recording software over and over again, drowning the entire piece in ambient noise, room resonances and the noise and errors of shitty software converters and microphones.”
More on NQ at nhlsqaik.com.