The Quick and the Dead & Barbo Inject Q – Most High, 2018
Experimental, Electro, Dub music LP – Duration: 56′41″
Budapest, QAD Collective – Optimal Crew / Independent Release
Most High is a sonic imprint of the collaborative and improvisational music work by the Budapest-based Optimal Crew and The Quick and the Dead (QAD) collective. Emerging from a series of jam sessions held between 2017 and 2018, the album is the result of shared sound-forming practices and experimental community-based creation. Its compositions evoke atmospheres shaped by experimental electronics, industrial noise, dub, and electro.
What sets the album apart is its layered sound collages and real-time effects processing, forming an acoustic organism in constant flux. The participating artists crafted the soundscape using both analog and digital tools – synthesizers, DAWs, distortion units, loopers, and field recordings all play integral roles. The project constructs organic, hybrid structures where individual stylistic elements – hip-hop, noise music, electronica, and experimental spoken word – interact not through opposition, but as interwoven sonic textiles.
A distinctive voice of the project is Barbo Inject Q (Bónyai Barbara), who performs her noise-poems, distorted rap fragments, and digital sound compositions live using a Kaoss Pad. Her vocal presence resists linear narration, functioning instead as a pre-linguistic, body-political mode of expression – whispers, raspy textual fragments, inarticulate outbursts, raps, and chants emerge as gestures of ritual anti-pop.
The collective’s members – r2d2, naut83, Alpi (András Murányi), Baxgas, DJ Vrhovny, and Zlatko Baracskai – engage in a sonic dialogue where remixing becomes not mere reinterpretation but a reactive construction using one another’s sonic vocabularies. The final tracks on the album, such as Blue Island (SL@T DUB), reflect the spatial and sensitive sound-weaving of Alpi (András Murányi), who passed away in 2022. In this light, the closing compositions resonate as fading echoes – quiet farewells carried through reverberating textures.
Most High is more than an audio release – it stands as a document of a particular era, encapsulating the communal and poetic-experimental exchanges within Hungary’s independent techno and noise scene. The album is a testament to a shared creative process where subcultural presence, cultural montage through sampling, and techno-spiritual rebellion all speak through a singularly textured sound language.