Quindar

Producer: Michael O’Reilly

Quindar is a collaboration between Grammy Award-winning musician Mikael Jorgensen of Wilco and local art historian and curator James Merle Thomas, currently teaching at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. Quindar’s existence is very closely tied to space. Combining historical research with musical performance, the duo uses archival audio and film to create ambient, electronic, and experimental music and accompanying projections. The band is named after Quindar tones, the transmission “beeps” heard during NASA’s early Apollo mission. Quindar has worked since 2012 with the National Air and Space Museum, USC School of Cinematic Arts and the National Archives to digitize archival recordings and films created by NASA researchers during the 1960s and 1970s. As a press release succinctly put it: “Tracks often function as historical documents here, combining the sounds of early computing, telemetry systems and radar equipment with space-mission recordings and early synthesizer technologies that flourished during the same era.” Their current album, “Hip Mobility”, was released in the summer of 2017. Friday Arts found them over Memorial Day Weekend performing for the Final Friday Series at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.