Pakistani-American avant-composer and drummer of the cult experimental acoustic trio Dawn of Midi, Qasim Naqvi, shares the second single Onna at Pulse, taken from his new album Beta — out June 20 to coincide with the first ever Love Record Stores Day, in support of local record shops. 

One in a series of experiments chronicling Naqvi’s understanding of writing for a modular synth, Onna at Pulse sounds like as if it moves in and out of the realms of control, twisting around a melody with a life of its own; "Onna at Pulse was the first piece of music I made with an extremely rudimentary modular synthesiser. I had just acquired two components and I wrote this simple exposition as an exercise to see what the machine would do. It was like teaching one eyeball to blink." — Qasim Naqvi

Meant as a prequel to last year's Teenages, a modular synth suite in six parts, Beta evolved from the most basic elements of a modular synthesiser. As Qasim explains; "One oscillator and a random voltage generator which is a module that releases sporadic currents through the system. Ironically, this component provided a lot of warmth and humanness to the music, a kind of fallibility. At the time I felt that this music was underdeveloped but listening back, I think the Beta tracks add an interesting dimension to the entire Teenages arc. They’re the zygotes.”

If Teenages captured the sound of electronics living, breathing and mutating of their own accord, Beta rather, describes the moment they came to life.

Love Record Stores Day is an initiative from the #loverecordstores campaign, launched during lockdown to encourage music fans to shop online with their favourite record stores. Qasim Naqvi joins a wide range of artists and labels who have pledged to release exclusive, limited edition records including Caribou, Belle and Sebastian, Beach House, Robyn, New Order and many more.