Brad Rose Q&A Part One Today - musical background and philosophy - thanks also for a great party!

quiet details
Jul 25
4 min read

Hi friends - hope all good :)

Thanks for an awesome Listening Party for Brad last night - as usual, you all showed what an incredible community we’re lucky enough to be a part of. Super supportive and only positive vibes - huge appreciation and love to all of you!

It’s so important to sit and really focus on music, to be able to do it together is a real privilege. It was the first time in a few days I’d listened to the album the whole way through in one sitting - in a vast catalogue of excellent music, I truly believe this some of Brad’s very best work.

Deeply emotive, ethereal, transcendent - from psychotropic layers of synths, to cascading waves of harps, to submerged vocals and so much more - this is an album of vast imagination, and perfectly formed.

Glad to see you agree - best-selling CD in any format on Bandcamp, best-selling ambient and fourth overall any genre/format - thank you!

CDs going fast so if you want they’re still here for now - remember to message me for the unique long-form mix if you bought one.

Now for Part One of the Q&A - big thanks to Brad for the honest answers.

Please tell us a bit about your background and history in music

I've been doing this for a long, long time. I began with guitar when was around 11. This was in the late 80s/early 90s and I desperately wanted to be a rock star. Discovered punk a few years later, went down that rabbit hole for a few years until someone I met in an AOL chat room (Punk Chat, in fact) told me about this tape label his friend in Portland, Oregon ran called Union Pole. A tape label? What? I was so intrigued so he sent me a few tapes and a Union Pole catalog. That was kind of the beginning of the end for me. From there, I became obsessed with home recording and tapes, sending off $3 here and $3 there for the strangest sounds I'd ever heard. Union Pole and Shrimper was both so formative (those two Neil Campbell tapes on Union Pole are amongst my holy grails and a reason (among many) I hold Neil in the highest possible regard). I started my own tape label at 14 or 15 called Cactus Gum. Roped my friends into it. Started writing reviews and interviewing fellow weirdos (Foxy Digitalis will celebrate 30 years in 2026). It made me feel alive. It helped me figure out if and how I belonged anywhere. It's been a mostly non-stop trip ever since (even when I disappeared between 2015 and 2020, it was still driving me, just not in any public way).

Please can you describe a bit about your general philosophy and process as an artist?

There are regular shifts and evolutions, but at the core has always been listening. Just listen. When Beatriz Ferreyra told me, "The sound is everywhere," a few years ago, it felt like the most perfect, succinct summation of what is at the center of my practice. Just listen and see how it feels. What moves us? What disgusts us? What soothes? Listen and question. Sometimes listening is trying to decipher and translate sounds in my head, or take ideas or images in my mind and turn them into sound worlds. A lot of my released work exists in that space, as documents or reminders.

But listening also extends into how I think about memory, place, and presence. I’m often trying to find the emotional residue in a sound, how a single tone or fragment can hold weight, can evoke a mood or suggest a time that doesn’t exist anymore. That could be a texture from a field recording or a fragment of melody that only half-remembers itself. I don't always know what I’m making when I begin, but I trust that the process of listening will reveal a shape or at least a trace.

I’m interested in what it means to make something feel lived-in, to make the listener feel like they’ve arrived somewhere uncertain but familiar. Most of my process is intuitive and built around layered iterations: building, eroding, distorting, and returning. Sometimes that means letting ambiguity linger or allowing a sound to remain unresolved. Other times, it means revisiting an idea across time, like an echo that changes form each time it returns.

What does quiet details mean to you and how did you use that to approach this album?

For me, “quiet details” are the things that sit just outside the center. Textures, gestures, and atmospheres that aren’t immediately loud or declarative but still carry weight. They’re the subtle shifts in tone or space that can shift an entire emotional undercurrent. That kind of quiet isn't about silence exactly. It has more to do with slowness, a kind of softness that invites deeper listening.

With A Life We Once Lived, I wanted to work from that place. Let the fragments speak on their own terms. Sometimes that meant letting sounds blur or decay before they fully arrived or clarified. Other times, it meant giving a small moment room to breathe without forcing it into a narrative. The album lives in those in-between spaces, in what’s unresolved and what’s almost remembered. The quiet details are what hold it together. They guide the movement without ever needing to explain it.

Now some shout-outs:

qd37 Brad Rose

Big thanks to Shawn Reynaldo for including a track from the album in his latest edition of First Floor - always essential reading!

qd36 Jo Johnson

Thanks to legend Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner for including a track on his latest EarSpace show on totally radio - always essential listening!

fields we found - rhythm structures 02

Really pleased to see all the positivity for this release - Shawn put some very kind words in the First Floor edition mentioned above - honoured to have my own music and qd music in the same edition (thanks again Shawn :))