Theo Alexander & QOW - So Afraid To Show I Care (Danse Noir)

The Slow Music Movement
Jun 19
3 min read

This is the cover of Theo Alexander & QOW's, "So Afraid To Show I Care" on Danse Noir records. It's a close-up of a teary eye in blue tones with "PANIC" written on it. A candle and razor blade are below, reflecting a somber mood.

Theo Alexander is a composer and pianist from London who now lives in Prague. He started releasing music in 2015, almost immediately taking his main instrument into ambient and minimal realms which he's been exploring at various tempos and intensities ever since. Well until this latest album, which seems him taking a decidedly leftfield turn to say the least.

Details are thin on the ground, but QOW is Omar El Sadek, an Egyptian emigré also based in Prague, where I imagine his intriguing and experimental soundscape abstractions are probably better received. Completing the line up are another Egyptian, Otoswed who is pulling no punches with his spoken words in Arabic - I'm not sure what he's saying but he sounds like he means it, and adventurous, improvising and uncompromising contrabassist Klára Pudláková.

Close-up of pianist and composer Theo Alexander with short hair, text projection on face, producing colorful patterns. Neutral expression, soft focus background.

The well titled, So Afraid To Show I Care is a sound foragers delight. Organ samples were collected from churches around Europe, those ecclesiastical sounds twisted into secular, if not downright atheistic form, far far away from their original remit. The rest of the sound sources emanated from a month-long residency at a former glassworks in Prague, the live recordings again snipped, shaped, twisted and turned into sonic collage suitable scraps ready for the mother of all production efforts. And what an immersive sonic voyage it is.

Not big on track titles the album starts gently enough with the fittingly entitled "01", micro-sounds and melodic fragments intermingling with field recordings, machine noise and manipulated samples. The sensibly named "02" spares no time lauding its minimal intentions, a string motif repeated probably still to this day, is surrounded by not unpleasant noise and counter melodies from various instruments, the juxtapositions uplifting and ritualistic, before the minimalism fades into a string drone that melts into the refreshing named "Addictive".

As you'd expect the tone changes, and so it should for such a powerful word. In comes bowed stand up bass and deeper electronic frequencies that blow out the candles and bring the mood down with a bump as a disembodied, auto-tuned vocal sails over the top and adds some spirit world soul to the darkness that cloaks the studio where a person unknown, emboldened by the anonymity, cocks and even fires a gun.

The album then proceeds along its subterranean path until the end, horn sounds stretched and wrapped around uneasy electronics on "04". Next up (I'll leave you to do the counting), Pudlakova bows and generally abuses her instrument until it sounds more like an idling car than a contrabass, as what sounds like distant train sounds and all sorts of sonic vagary create a not unpleasant, symphony in noise major.

The crew give the faint of heart a slightly lighter but still edgy breather in "06" before

Otteswed speaks his truth on "دنيا تجيبك تحت" over a restless ambient soundscape peppered with more firearm priming and intermittent, subwoofer testing beats and bass. "08" is a haunting ambient tune visited again by spectral vocals and the sound of trains rattling through tunnels, before the album title track sees the vocals come into clearer, if still unintelligible focus, as Pudlakova delivers her most obvious bowed bass contribution until the track prises open the studio door and dissolves in the sunlight. I don't know what this album is saying, but I like the way it says it. And that's enough.