JOE CARDAMONE Elaborates Why Love Is Hell On 19-Track ‘QUARENTINA (EXPANDED)’
JOE CARDAMONE
Reaffirms Love Is Hell
With “Expanded” Version of His Magnum Opus
QUARENTINA
via Sonic Ritual
NOVEMBER 19, 2024 (New York, NY) — If there is one singular truth in the world, it’s that Love Is Hell, and one person decided not to fight it and instead capture its essence and craft it into a work of art. Formerly of punk agitators/heroes The Icarus Line and one half of the dark disco duo Dark Mark vs. Skeleton Joe (with the late Mark Lanegan), Joe Cardamone splays out this simple universal truism with the release of the expanded version of his Covid-borne magnum opus, QUARENTINA (EXPANDED) (now available via Sonic Ritual).
Originally released on June 1, 2021 in the midst of the pandemic, Quarentina was a 19-track master stroke that plumbed the depths of loss and grief, fully-exposed in its raw, visceral glory. The expanded version adds an additional twelve tracks.
Photo credit: Travis Keller
Slumming through life after a recent difficult breakup at the time, Cardamone was practically forced into the studio to bottle the vacillating emotions and commit them to tape. “I was sitting on my back porch during the Covid winter, wondering where my life was going wrong,” he painfully reminisces.
“I was merely existing, absorbing slow sustained waves of grief and hanging with a good friend [producer/engineer Michael Musmanno] who was there to check on me. While I was outlining the forensics of my disaster, he stopped me and pointed to the studio in the yard. ‘Go in there and sing about it,’ he ordered me.”
The result was an experimental collection of 19 mini-songs that is an immersive dive into the collective paranoia and high strangeness of life in Los Angeles during the pandemic Sincere, surprisingly empathetic and blazingly raw, Quarentina tells of the dissolution of a relationship, reinforcing that “Love Is Hell” trope.
Cardamone assembled the pièce de resistance into a cohesive whole, held together oh-so-precariously by a thin thread of hope. “They were super brief pieces, mostly a minute or less,” he explains. ‘Sing whatever comes out, don’t listen back, and move on,’ he told himself. “Over the next two days, I recorded in a sort of fever… I put the whole mess on tape. On the third day, I finally listened to it. It was not without obvious flaws (nearly every vocal was a first take, and the words were off-the-dome), but there was something rather beautifully honest about it.. something cringe about the songs too, but I liked that.”
Quarentina was accompanied by a companion film of vignettes, matching the intensity and brief flashes of the original audio. Joined by friend and fellow musician Carré Calloway (Queen Kwong), who acted as one half of the doomed relationship, Cardamone portrays its dissolution in the form of an episodic, black and white, modern noir. Based on real life events, the film is intermingled with dreamy surrealism that comes in like a fever dream.
Written and filmed where some of the actual events took place, it tells the story of a couple being crushed under the weight of their own demons and the prospect of the end times, a relationship dissolving over the course of the quarantine, shown through an intimate, tender and harrowing snapshot of the lonely isolation during those trying times.
“We all met to shoot once or twice a week, keeping the circle tight with filmmakers Travis Keller and Jacob Mendel being the only other people on set for most of it,” he remembers. “We all had a purpose and a goal to drop one song or episode every week. The deeper we got into the mini saga, the more we needed additional music.”
Photo credit: Darian Zahedi
The expanded version of Quarentina collects the full breadth of music with the additional 12 tracks that were written and created for the film. “I would run down to the studio and bang out a quick track to complete whatever visual we were on,” Cardamone says of the additional music.
“Some of my favorite musical moments from the project didn’t make it on the initial release, ‘What would I do?’ and ‘Leviathan’ being two of my faves. I guess that’s what inspired us to drop an expanded edition; some of the best tunes from the project were not available until now.”
To accompany the release of the expanded edition, the final full-length feature version of Quarentina will be screened in December 2024 for the first time at LOST ANGELES (1457 Venice Blvd., Los Angeles, CA), Cardamone’s collective’s art space in Los Angeles. Details on the screening will be posted HERE soon.
Looking back at the dark and dreary times, Cardamone has a startling epiphany. “Those three days were the best I had felt in weeks,” he beams, reflecting on the creative explosion he had in 2021. “I didn’t want it to end. This was my life raft now keeping me afloat with the help of my best friends, who were also melting away under the radiation of Covid lockdowns.”
Quarentina (Expanded) is now released by Sonic Ritual at https://hypeddit.com/btywom and on Soundcloud.
QUARENTINA (EXPANDED)
Track Listing
- Laws
- Dead Sky
- Flowers
- Nine of Swords
- New Moon
- Lisbon
- Count In Sevens
- Nite Theme (Rock n Roll)
- Crushed Skull
- Sabbath
- Yeshua
- Cluster B
- Day Six
- Red Flag
- Dec Piano
- Revelations
- The Tower
- Baby Blue
- Ur So Cool 2
Additional tracks - Time Machine
- The Heat
- Seven in Heaven
- Leaving
- When U Kno
- I Kno
- She’s on the Floor
- What Would I Do?
- Smoking In Front of a Burning House
- Leviathan
- Ending
- Closing Remarks
ABOUT JOE CARDAMONE
Los Angeles native artist Joe Cardamone has lived a few lifetimes while leaving a wiry dent in the global underground music and film scenes. The band that Joe fronted for 17 years, The Icarus Line, formed in East Los Angeles in 1998. Over the course of six albums the punk agitators became an underground phenomenon and the most dangerous, if not the greatest, punk group of their generation.
The cult band never gave up. Performances at the Reading and Leeds Festivals in front of 30,000+ fans, multiple appearances on the legendary John Peel show, criss-crossing the US in a van opening a stadium tour for A Perfect Circle and The Cult and a UK tour with Primal Scream are just some of the “greatest hits” of a legend loaded with nearly mythic live performances and chaos.
But it was the death of guitarist and original member Alvin DeGuzman in 2017 following a long battle with cancer, which was the actual end of The Icarus Line (a demise recently depicted in Michael Grodner’s independent film “The Icarus Line Must Die” which is now streaming on Vudu, Trubi, AppleTV, and Amazon).
The following year Joe released his solo debut, the frenzied Holy War album and film on his own imprint American Primitive. Cardamone’s new approach was a modern one man show that forged R&B and crushing electronics with the combative spirit of his formative punk years.
While crafting a pair of follow up albums in 2020 the world stopped and the QUARENTINA project emerged in response. Outside of his work as an artist Joe has produced and collaborated with some of the greatest artists of our time including Mark Lanegan, Ian Astbury, Warren Ellis (Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds) and James Williamson (The Stooges).
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