Brooklyn’s Meagan Rodriguez (aka QRTR) is back on Dome of Doom with her second album, infina ad nausea.
While rooted in transfixing house, infina ad nausea finds unique deviations through drum & bass, ambient, classical, and IDM. It follows Drenched, QRTR’s debut album for Dome of Doom, released in 2020.
The record was produced at various locations around Brooklyn, and some of the material dates back to 2017. It includes field recordings captured at Notre Dame, Paris in 2018, as well as the Catskill Mountains in New York.
Every track is “filled to the brim” with synths, percussion, drums, samples, and original vocal parts from Rodriguez, we’re told. Features include QRTR’s cat companion, ambientkitty, vocalist artemis orion, and New York artists Braille, Daniel de Lara, and CSLTY.
Conceptually, the album explores the way artistic and personal life collide in challenging ways. From the titles to the music itself, every aspect is “a piece of the puzzle that endlessly spirals over one another,” we’re told.
infina ad nausea is a play on latin terms “ad infinitum” and “ad nauseum.” “I was trying to create a phrase to describe growing sick of a false feeling of permanence, as though you’re living in a never ending loop,” Rodriguez says. “I was steeping in the concept of ‘spiral’ which is a theme I’ve been coming back to constantly in my art and life since 2011. I always felt as though I was living within a series of full circles overlapping on each other, creating the illusion of a spiral.”
She’s even arranged the tracks to feel like the act of spiralling mentally and emotionally. “It starts off bright and playful and becomes more frenzied until suddenly you’ve reached ‘the point,’ which is ever moving and evolving and thus unreachable,” she says.
Raised by a father from Puerto Rico and a mother from Madeira, a Portuguese island off the coast of Morocco, Rodriguez’ familial connection to the sea informs her approach to music production: a constant search for release through repetition. She decided she wanted to produce and play music out in 2014, after a psychedelic experience at her first music festival, Bonnaroo. In June, she contributed to EDMjunkies+31 alongside Wylie Cable, Gnome Beats, and CLYDE. Check that out here.
All tracks were mixed by QRTR and mastered by Ryan Schwabe.
Tracklisting
01. The Outer Edge (feat. ambientkitty)
02. With You (feat. artemis orion)
03. Want Me 2
04. Running From It
05. Fractals
06. Like That
07. Nossa [Interlude]
08. Blame Me (feat. Daniel de Lara)
09. Ritual (feat. CSLTY)
10. Rewind
11. Lucid (feat. Braille)
infina ad nausea LP is scheduled for August 27 release. Meanwhile, you can stream “Want Me 2” in full via the player below.
