“When you’re playing instrumental music — and particularly instrumental organ or keyboard music — your fingers are doing all the talking,” says Mr. Quintron on a phone call with the Scene. “So things like mistakes that can benefit rock ’n’ roll and other types of music are not what you want.”
He’s the organ-and-electronics half of New Orleans duo Quintron and Miss Pussycat. Quintron’s partner brings background vocals and puppet performance to their shows, which typically lean toward R&B-schooled rock. The pair is gearing up for a quick jaunt across the Southeast supporting some material that’s a bit different, but has familiar elements. Erotomania: Quintron at the Chamberlin, due Nov. 15 via Mind Meld Records, is a 12-inch EP consisting of six instrumentals featuring a 1950s tape-based organ. The songs come across as a bizarro-world take on the exotica oddness of Martin Denny and Les Baxter, and the record’s vibe is something like “Tiki Bar at the End of Time.” Pick a riff from any track, and you could turn it into the leitmotif for a groovy B-movie bad guy — one who digs composers like Raymond Scott and Terry Riley, anyway.
“But you still have to swing,” Quintron continues. “You still have to play behind the beat if you want to, push it if you want to. There’s much more concentration involved in that kind of music than the stuff that I’m used to. I can have three shots of whiskey and play a four-hour Quintron and Miss Pussycat set like fallin’ off a log. But this stuff takes some more focus. I didn’t learn in church, where it is all about chords and bass pedals. But I’m pretty good with single-note melodies, and my right hand can go really fast.”
A Q&MP set, for the uninitiated, is one of the great spectacles of American underground music over the past couple of decades. Quintron’s “Frankenstein organ rig” — including Hammond, Chamberlin and Mellotron instruments — and Miss Pussycat’s puppet shows create a surreal alternate universe in every room they visit. Imagine Pee-wee’s Playhouse was set in a psychedelic sweat lodge and you’re getting there. It is as wild and wonderful as anything on the road. (Here’s a parental advisory: Q&MP videos have a similar potency. They will make your toddler commit adorable acts of weirdness that they definitely didn’t learn from Sesame Street. Consume at your own risk, and kiss your naps goodbye.)
Despite the control and exactitude of Erotomania’s “Bohemian Caverns,” there’s still a wildness at its core, and it helps recast the formalism of the early stereo era for a post-streaming world. “Dixie Disaster” digs deep into the early 20th century as misremembered by the Greatest Generation, before dissolving into a freakout on par with Terry Riley’s “Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band.”
“It’s really fun, it’s sorta mellow and it is probably not for everyone,” Quintron says of his new compositions. “But it’s something that I really enjoy, and I’m happy I finally had enough material and a label crazy enough to release it.”
These new explorations are a nice complement to a career marked by inventive interactions between artist and automaton. The Drum Buddy instrument that Quintron invented is legendary in the DIY electronics community, and his Weather Warlock project — a machine that uses input from rain, sunlight and more to control a heavy synthesizer drone — has led to installations across the country. (That includes an installation on the roof of Third Man Records during the total solar eclipse in 2017.) And Miss Pussycat’s visual style has influenced scores of garage-theater weirdos, with puppets that blend our current weird reality with the vintage oddness of a kids’ program from the dawn of television.
As we talk fall tour plans — including an enviable week of Florida gigs in early November — Quintron mentions that he and Miss Pussycat will go into the studio with Greg Cartwright (of Reigning Sound and The Oblivians, among others). The Oblivians Play Nine Songs With Mr. Quintron, released in 1997, is one of the greatest garage records of that decade, maybe of all time, and this impending reunion is big news for a very specific set of nerds. But for now, let us hush: It’s time to let the fingers to do the talking.
“It doesn’t need to be 1-2-3-4-fuck-you music all the time,” Mr. Quintron says. “Even cavemen need a rest sometime.”
