Daniel Quasar is an artist who loves spending time in liminal spaces — those points in between the conclusory. So it makes sense that Quasar, the Portland, Oregon-based creator of the popular Progress Pride flag, would create music that is tough to pin down to any single, delineated genre.
On their latest album, Memories of a Future Never Came, Quasar deftly crafts evocative, catchy electronic songs and instrumental tracks that involve electropop, house, disco, synthwave, and even 2814-meets-Hans Zimmer dark cinematic colors. The songs swirl around those genres, catching bits and pieces of them with a glue to construct something new. Drawing on various inspirations, including Portland’s drag scene (their name was Saturn), the navigation of panic disorder, and the storied Japanese “Royal Road” chord progression, Quasar is taking the synth scene to an elevated level.
“I have come to learn that I’m very fascinated with — and this is a cheesy word — liminal spaces and the in-between, and the value of negative space,” Quasar told Vehlinggo in a recent interview over Zoom. “This album is all about nostalgia, and I called it Memories of a Future Never Came because it’s about projects that didn’t pan out, or it’s about things that didn’t work, or feelings that didn’t go long enough to be felt. But I want to honor all of those disparate loose ends by putting them all together and letting them actually be and exist and have cohesion with each other and just be witnessed.”
The Royal Road is a relatively common chord progression in Japanese music, depicted as “IV-V-iii-vi” in music theory. (If you add sevenths to it, it gets even more interesting.) A profound number of Japanese pop songs and anime soundtracks rely on the progression that is neither overly ecstatic nor exceedingly melancholy.
Quasar isn’t trained in music, and doesn’t really think about which key a song should be in. However, they are a fan of Japanese music and after a YouTube dive, they got the idea to try writing a song using the Royal Road progression.
“I was fascinated by that, because I have a really big love for Japanese culture, and I was like, well, now I want to make a song using the Royal Road progression,” Quasar says.
The result is the exquisite “Be Alone Tonight,” which sounds like Depeche Mode going cinematic and getting shot deep into outer space.
“Those are those moments where I’m like, OK, there’s something really interesting that I want to try, and I utilize that when I’m creating something,” Quasar says, “but for the most part, it’s kind of just a lot of trial and error and and figuring it out.”
Although Quasar’s been fairly prolific musically over the past few years, most of the public knows them for the now-storied Progress Pride flag. Around 2018 Quasar, in a fit of insomnia, created the flag — taking the classic 1978 rainbow flag and adding forward-looking chevrons to represent trans people and queer people of color. When it hit the Internet, it quickly went viral and eventually would end up adorning homes and businesses across the world. Quasar’s visual artistry and design work earned heavy interest (and still do to this day).
j
Over the course of this Q&A, we’ll touch on that flag fame, along with their artistic and mental health experiences and cultural touchstones, such as drag, that influence their music and specifically Memories of a Future Never Came. We take a few detours along the way. (The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.) [The album is out now digitally and available for physical pre-order via RetroSynth Records.]
Vehlinggo: Daniel, I want to start out with a common — but what I think is an important question — about the new album: What does your creative process look like and what inspired you thematically with both the lyrics and the sonics?
Quasar: I tend to approach every album differently. I did do a lot of music when I was younger — I was in band in middle school and high school, and I took some music theory classes. But a lot of my electronic music, which I started in 2006, was really about tinkering and figuring it out as I go. I think a lot of artists in this genre are similar in that respect. I’m the one who literally draws notes where I want them to play on the timeline. It’s very much, “Does this sound good?”
I’m not one who says, “Oh, I’m gonna play A-minor and I’m gonna have these chords,” and things like that, unless I’m intentionally looking up [the Royal Road progression] for, like, my latest single, “Be Alone Tonight”… For the most part, it’s kind of just a lot of trial and error, and figuring it out. Also, nothing will ever sound like anything I’ve done before. Usually people will say, “Can you do this song again?” And the answer is no.
“It’s like a nostalgia for things that didn’t happen…”
A bit like lightning in a bottle, or something like that? Does your visual art and design work follow that same principle of no repeats?
It’s present in every art medium that I play with. Maybe it’s ADHD. Maybe I get inspired by so many different things. I’m one of those people that has the hobby closet — I start a hobby, don’t finish it, and then it just goes in the closet and you just ignore it because, you know, it’s fine. We don’t need to think about it. But, I do have a style, an aesthetic. You can find through lines in the work that I do with everything, but they might be more unconventional.
I had a friend of mine review my previous album — he’s a really great writer and I wanted his perspective. He made me realize that I’m a multi-genre artist. I love fusing different genres together and so the through lines end up being more — I don’t know if this is the right word(s) — “abstract” or “esoteric.” If people were to ask me about this current album, I wouldn’t say there is a specific genre other than the big “electronic” umbrella. My personal though line for it, though, is nostalgia. It’s like a nostalgia for things that didn’t happen, which I think also works really well with synthwave.
It’s for a 1980s that was way better than the real ‘80s was.
Yeah, exactly. It’s the dream version of the ‘80s, and that’s what they attached to.
Skipping back in time a bit: I was reading an interview you did several years ago — around the time your flag was first going viral. You referred to the onset of your “family curse” of panic disorder. How, if at all, does that affect your music, and specifically this new album?
For years, I used to do drag regularly here [in Portland] locally. That was my thing. I loved doing it. We did tons of different drag shows, [including] Dungeons and Drag Queens, which was this really interesting mashup of “Dungeons and Dragons.” It was stupid on purpose and fun.
But what had happened was the panic disorder just started manifesting in 2017. When it came to a head, I realized I had to quit drag. It was basically like having your whole idea of self ripped out from under you, all at once. I was like, “Cool, I am agoraphobic now.”
I couldn’t leave the house, because as I described it to people, it was like having a physical tether attached to my chest. Any time I’d try to leave the house, I would start to feel it pull, and I’d feel terrible and go right back into the house.
Being an artist, you’re constantly still making work regardless of whatever you’re going through. Being an insomniac and making this flag in the middle of the night and then having it blow up at the same time that I’m going through all of this anxiety bullshit… Everyone wanted to talk to me about the flag.
[Five or six years ago] the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry were having their annual Pride event and asked me to come do a talk about my flag. I asked if I could talk about my experience of going through my mental health stuff, because it’s in line with my experience with developing the flag and it going viral and all of those things. So I gave a talk that was the timeline of the birth and growth of the flag, but told through the timeline of my mental health journey that was happening at the same time. I use those parallel things to talk about this stuff.
When it comes to panic disorders, you have to tell your brain that things are OK. You use exposure therapy to get past it. The talk was my way of giving my brain permission to learn that we’re safe here, which, by the way, was a success. I had a great time and no anxiety. It was so fantastic. After two-plus years of really bad panic attacks, to have a solid hour of being who I was before, and being able to engagewith people, was a phenomenal feeling. And so I always try to strive to grab that whenever I can find an opportunity for it.
To get to what you were asking about, I feel like it has heavily influenced what I do with my music and any of the art that I do now, because I think one of the big things that I lost in that process is my ego. I feel like a lot of the things that I did were driven by my own ego, and so by having lost a lot of that ego because of the panic disorder, I was able to approach my work and my art and the things that I did with more intention and without that ego involved.
I did it because I had an interest in it, or it seemed important, and less so because I wanted to catch the next big thing. [So,] it does definitely influence my work.
It’s notable that the onset COVID-19 pandemic and your panic disorder’s “tether” crashed into each other.
Oh, it was great. I was prepared for this.
You started making music in 2006, but it seems like your actual releasing of singles and albums is a later artistic cycle. Or am I missing something?
I started with electronic music in 2006, and it was just what I had always wanted ever since I was a kid. I was heavy into Britney Spears and all the pop girlies. I was one of those gay kids: I wanted to dance to Britney music and I wanted to be Britney. I wanted to be a pop star, but I never had an avenue for actually doing that. I couldn’t figure it out.
But in 2006 a friend of mine introduced me to Reason, which is an electronic [digital audio workstation]. It just blew my mind. You mean I can just make music and noises on the computer?! And I can just do it on my own?!
I didn’t start actively releasing anything until about 2015, though. I had done some things before that, but no one is going to find out about those. I keep a stack of CD singles that I put out in 2007 behind my bookcase, because those will come out when I’m famous and need to make money on eBay. In 2015 was when I started to feel like “I’m making songs now. I’m making something.”
But 2018 was when I put out my debut album, [Outsider], and it was my Kate Bush album. I’d been working on it for 10 years — you know, that kind of thing. What I actually did was then put out an album in 2019, [Alternate], and at the end of 2020 [WAVES]. That was me trying to make stuff happen.
I call WAVES my “real first album,” because it’s the one I felt most proud of. I love all the music I’ve made, but this was cohesive. It has a complete picture to it. I invested so much into it — time, effort, and money. I put it out on vinyl and CD on my own. And it really didn’t go anywhere, because I was a small, indie artist who was doing it myself. And then, of course, COVID came around. After three years of releasing albums, it was really disheartening. I just got super disenfranchised from what I was doing. I didn’t feel like pumping out another album in nine months.
And so you’ll notice that my catalog shifts from 2020 till now into one song a year. That was me trying to rediscover who I was as an artist, and that I needed a hard reset on what I was doing. I needed to find why I was doing it and also find the joy in it again.
In 2024 I put out “Transit” and still nothing was really happening. But I said at the time, “I’m just not gonna worry about it right now.” And then… I always find this happens to me: When I reach those points — where I give up on the thing that I’m trying to do — is when something actually happens.
“When I reach those points — where I give up on the thing that I’m trying to do — is when something actually happens.”
I gave up on it and then after that I met Alex Lightspeed [last fall]. I’m a designer by trade, and he needed help with design work for his vinyl release. He found out during that period that I was also a musician. I helped him out with some of the music side of [his album], too.
While I was working with him on his album, I got kind of reinvigorated and started making music. I was putting together an album again, because it just started coming back to me. He said he knew the people at RetroSynth and would I like him to say “hi”? All of those events just really snowballed into me working on the album, getting signed almost immediately to the label, and that really blew up so many things for me.
What do you want the listeners to get out of this — your fans or new people who are discovering you?
I’m going to talk about myself, and then it will play into how it fits, into what I want people to get out of it.
I find a lot of value in putting a spotlight on the thing that can’t be spotlighted or that is not often spotlighted, and that is those in-between, liminal spaces. Because I feel like I live a lot in those spaces, especially now with my mental health journey and stuff like that. A lot of my time is spent introspective… with myself…with my cats, making music or making art. So the idea is that I want people experience that feeling of being in that space and actually acknowledging it.
I feel like we’re always constantly talking about going from A to B, but we’re never talking about the line between A and B, and so I’m just really fascinated with that whole idea. I’m also really obsessed with death right now, because I’m getting older and it’s weird for me, because — I’ll get a little too personal here for a moment. By partner is 19 years older than me, and so, everybody has their thing that they spiral with —existential dread or whatever — it’s different for everyone. And mine is what happens in the future? I think way too far ahead.
I grew up super conservative Christian in a very conservative household. But I left all that, because I knew it was shit, so I don’t have that fundamental thing that was instilled within me. I don’t have that anymore, because I don’t believe it anymore. So now that I’m in my 40s, and I’m actually having to contend with this idea of, in 40 years, who knows what that’s gonna look like. I realize that’s four decades from now, but still, as somebody who deals with anxiety and panic, that could be tomorrow. Time is irrelevant.
“At the end of the day, it’s an art piece.”
I’m obsessed with the idea of the what-ifs and the what-could. The album plays a lot on that and the concept of the in-between. I feel like the album is being caught in a thought spiral.
But what a listener gets out of it is entirely what they’re going to get out of it. As somebody who went to art school and had to go through that whole process, you learn real fast that everything is subjective and art is in the eye of the beholder. As a designer, I have to try to think about all those things. But the artist part of me is like, it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, it’s an art piece. It’s a body of work. What somebody is going to think about it is entirely their thing. And I’m cool with whatever they come up with, because half the time I’m fascinated when somebody comes up and they’re like, this makes me think about this and that. And I’ll say, “I never thought that; that’s really awesome. Thank you for sharing that.”
