Musician Quintron makes music with the weather – to forget the pain of lymphoma

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/may/14/quintron-weather-warlock-healing-power-music

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The humidity peaks in the dark nightclub packed with hundreds of excited, drunk bodies, when New Orleans one-man-band Quintron turns the key on his “Drum Buddy”, lighting it up like a miniature aurora borealis.

One of several esoteric instruments Quintron has invented over the last 20 years, the Drum Buddy begins to spin beside his humming Hammond organ, emitting percussive analog bleeps and bloops.

With a magician’s grace, Q’s long hands manipulate the strange glowing totem, stretching the sawtooth notes. The crowd remains transfixed, focused on the Drum Buddy until the stage lights blast on, unveiling his puppeteer wife Miss Pussycat beside him, shaking her maracas in a hand-sewn, anthropomorphic dress. Quintron’s drum machine beat and the room’s barometric pressure drop simultaneously, and condensation gathers on the floor as dancing erupts.

This is what New Orleans music legends Mr Quintron and Miss Pussycat were born to do.

But their skies darkened in 2013 when, on the verge of a 40-city US tour, Quintron (born Robert Rolston) was diagnosed with stage-four lymphoma. He and Miss Pussycat quietly cancelled their tour, explaining why to as few people as possible.

“To be totally honest,” admits Quintron from his home in New Orleans’s Ninth Ward, “I did another tour after I found out in the window before the chemo started. I brought all my friends to just forget everything. I didn’t give myself time to feel something. We called it the ‘Isle of Denial’ tour,” he says, appropriating the nickname given to the tiny area of New Orleans that didn’t flood in Katrina. “I had to cancel the last night, the Nashville gig, because I felt too sick. Not to sound heroic, but I played until I was about to die.”

The couple would perform just two or three more shows over the next year, including a cameo on David Simon’s HBO Katrina drama, Treme.

Instead of lying in bed during his mandatory downtime, Quintron found solace in the creation of a new invention: the 7ft-tall Weather Warlock, a synthesizer that reads the outside temperature, wind, sunlight and rain, and reinterprets it as droning, oscillating “music”.

“I wanted its sounds to be mostly beautiful,” says Q, who sculpted the sound palette partly for his own therapeutic purposes. “When I first built it, it was screeching horror, white noise static, sharp-edged oscillations. I slowly worked it into what I wanted it to be: harmonious sounds. But I do still have some ugly ones – lightning would be one of those. And sometimes before sunset it emits some atonal surprising things.”

A global temperature sensor controls a grinding bass note that continuously cycles through a phase that moves faster in the heat, slower in the cold. The anemometer measures wind speed via spinning cups that send out a digital pulse like you hear in submarine movies. A periscope aimed at the sky hosts a UV sensor: “It’s specially calibrated to remain silent and only emit sound when in the flux between light and dark – only at sunrise and sunset, except on that rare storm.”

Precipitation and rain are represented by a set of brass probes set just a millimeter apart. “When a raindrop falls between the two probes it connects them together, and makes a sound that’s determined by the chemical makeup of the rain; some days the rain is more metallic and more conductive,” he explains.

His new Weather Warlock went through three incarnations. In 2011, Quintron first installed it as the “Singing House” within the Music Box project, wherein New York artist Swoon asked a dozen artists to build separate structures that could each be played as musical instruments. Quintron then conducted internationally acclaimed musicians playing all of the musical structures at once.

The second prototype, Weather Witch, was an attempt to “productize” the invention for sale by Jack White’s Third Man Records. “It turned out not to be a good idea; customer support would have made it not feasible,” says Quintron, who gave up after a year of struggle. He did gain valuable knowledge from the experience, as well as some wild memories. “One weekend we were at Third Man … Neil Young was recording an album there and we watched. He checked out the invention. At one point he picked up a light sensor. He immediately did something really musical with,” Quintron laughs, “Some people can make music with anything they touch. He picked it up and a little song emerged.”

Experimental musicians, from Wilco’s Nels Cline to performance artist Laurie Anderson, have purchased Drum Buddies, and in 2009, Quintron’s spinning, light-activated analog synth was celebrated in the New Orleans Museum of Art. Quintron and Pussycat’s diversification from rock clubs into the art world helped put them in the sights of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, whose artist residency reached out to offer them a dual residency in 2013.

“I knew I was gonna have kickin’ ass weather,” Q says of their month-long residency on exclusive Captiva Island, in the sunshine state of Florida. “It’s certainly windy enough there to activate the anemometer all day, every day.”

By then, his hair had grown back. “I was still on chemo though not the terrible kind,” he remembers. “Captiva was a very healing environment for me. That place, and the spirit of Robert Rauschenberg, it changed my life.”

Upon returning home to New Orleans, Quintron picked up a guitar for the first time to begin an improvisational band that would play along to the droning Weather Warlock, with most concerts occurring at sunset. Q grew his hair long and took the Weather Warlock on tour, collecting different collaborators in each city.

“We did it with two reed players from Sun Ra Arkestra. One with Germs drummer Don Bowles, one in San Francisco with Grux from Caroliner Rainbow playing bass. I wanted every gig to sound like the city it was in, so in Miami we had noise artist Rat Bastard plus a Cuban percussionist and a techno DJ. In New York we had Steve Shelly and Sean Lennon.” The band’s album, Sunset Waits for No Man, is out on vinyl this month.

For many reasons, Quintron considers the Weather Warlock his most meaningful creation. “I would never pretend that this is a cure for anything; I was healed by having a purpose and a job and an obsession to replace touring. But the Weather Warlock’s sounds were very soothing, for me. It sounds cheesy, but it helped the pain fade into the background.”

In another nod to the Weather Warlock’s therapeutic properties, Quintron created the online live streaming radio station Weather for the Blind, where listeners can hear the weather in New Orleans 24 hours a day. “Some blind people suffer from Circadian Rhythm Disorder, where their sleep patterns are messed up partly because they can’t experience time properly, or weather,” says Quintron, who stresses that he’s not an expert.

Nonetheless, he can only hope that his Weather Warlock might provide something more to people than just interesting music – the way it has for him.