top of page
Michael VQ | latest releases
4U&URMØN$TER
OUT NOW
COVER ART BY MATT SAUNDERS
MIXED BY DAVE HODGE
MASTERED BY JOE LAMBERT
click image to listen. scroll down for videos.
LUX by Michael VQ
Year of production: 2024
Video Running Time: 5:52 min
Follow Michael VQ on Spotify HERE.
A song for my daughter, Zelda Lux, featuring the unfathomably wonderful Adina Verson.
The (epic) guitar solo in this tune is based on the way Zelda approaches musical instruments: LOUDER, FASTER, HIGHER!!!! FOREVER!!!!!!!!!!
Michael VQ:
MUSIC: vocals / loops / guitar / production
FILM: direction / edit / color
RICH P by Michael VQ
Year of production: 2024
Video Running Time: 3:52 min
Follow Michael VQ on Spotify HERE.
How better to celebrate the inevitable takedown of the enfeebled commoner than with the booty-jigglin-est beat ever made from broken piano samples, whoopie cushion analog bass, and a blind-drunk horn section? Enter our most beloved cultural hero: RICH P, a man so monied that the notion of considering others is literally repulsive. “No one in the Family can remember what it means / To work a single minute of the week / They only gamble on the backs of the meek!” In this fourth single from Michael VQ, we celebrate the natural conclusion of late-stage capitalism: wealth so grandiose that it's grown big enough teeth to devour us all!
Michael VQ:
MUSIC: vocals / loops / production
FILM: edit / color
O FACE by Michael VQ
Year of production: 2024
Video Running Time: 4:20 min
Follow Michael VQ on Spotify HERE.
“I am gonna watch the waves wash cityscapes away / While the kids with their O faces sing to me…” The infectiously mournful chorus laments the tumbling empire; we’d have risen to prevent it if only we could’ve ripped our eyes from the gyrating onscreen youth, shoveled into our sockets by the algorithm…. C’est la vie…. On a record otherwise built from recording malfunction and anti-melody, O FACE is the outlier, dripping with beeswax falsetto and oceanic symphony, the track proves that Michael VQ has absolute command of the musical sounds he creates, and re-focuses the listener on the rest his debut album, 4U&URMØN$TER (for you and your monster) which possesses such an odd newness it can at times trick the listener into wondering if it’s all accidental. “The world is crumbling down all around me / But i just don’t care / We become what we’re meant to be.”
ARTWORK BY MATT SAUNDERS.
Michael VQ:
MUSIC: vocals / loops / keys / production
FILM: edit
FIRST WORLD VIOLENCE by Michael VQ
Year of production: 2024
Video Running Time: 4:30 min
Follow Michael VQ on Spotify HERE.
The FIRST WORLD VIOLENCE beat shambles forward erratically, a broken meter — 2 bars of 3/4 followed by a 12/4 bar — like the drunken CEO who just emptied the grandkids’ college fund to invest it all in Lockheed, cuz hip hip hooray, another war’s a-brewin.’ We pray for peace while those making policy pray for profits, and the nukes just get bigger. FWV calls out our cultural addiction to bloodshed, and states plainly the crooked intentions of the military industrial complex, so the elephantine Rhodes chorus can stampede forth to press those sentiments deep into the mud where they belong.
ANIMATION by BEEPLE.
Michael VQ:
MUSIC: vocals / loops / production
FILM: edit
THE REMAKES by Michael VQ
Year of production: 2024
Video Running Time: 3:24 min
Follow Michael VQ on Spotify HERE.
"Rinse and repeat till repeat is the rule now you and yours only ever repeat too? ... We just can't get enough, get enough of The Remakes." Shimmering female vocal samples attack your face while manic kicks and analog bass bees fly up into your butt and tickle your dance reflex. Ecstatic electronic dance protest music for gleefully gyrating in the face of infuriating musical redundancy... And narrative redundancy... And power redundancy... And redundancy redundancy.
Michael VQ:
MUSIC: vocals / loops / production
FILM: cinematography / direction / edit
TWINKIES by Michael VQ
Year of production: 2024
Video Running Time: 4:10 min
Follow Michael VQ on Spotify HERE.
TWINKIES has no melody and its beat is built from clipped reverb tails, digital problems, and dissonant clanks from a piano filled with nails. It shouldn’t work as music. It shouldn’t be as infectious as it is. But here we are… The 3rd single from Michael VQ offers odd newness yet again, challenging old definitions of art-making, and inviting musicians with something meaningful to say up to bat. Lyrically, TWINKIES makes a simple observation: if given the choice between something good for humanity or snack cake, folks all too often go with the snack cake. Then mother capitalism says “supply and demand, yo, make more snack cake.” Cuz what the people choose is always best, right? … RIGHT??!?! “The people had spoken and they’d got what they’d chosen / They know best / We take care of the rest…”
Michael VQ:
MUSIC: vocals / loops / production
FILM: cinematography / direction / edit
BADDEST by Michael VQ
Year of production: 2024
Video Running Time: 3:26 min
Follow Michael VQ on Spotify HERE.
How many thick synths and buzzsaw basses fit over a face-slapping bull beat? This many. In a world of limp and lazily profane diss tracks, BADDEST slithers up from the playground wood chips to beg these undisciplined pre-schoolers to pipe down. This dirt-funk chip-hop glam-solo party track is a takedown of takedowns -- without a single syllable of profanity -- for craft's sake. Because: can we please move on from all this beefless beef? ... "I need a little more proof that you're the baddest / a higher bar for baddest needs to be established / you barely made it to a very sorry average / we're all a little supid-er since you became a rapper."
Michael VQ:
MUSIC: vocals / loops / production
FILM: cinematography / direction
bottom of page