Quark Pair

**Joyrex** · December 6, 2021

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While most '80s electronic music was the product of twenty-and-thirty-something baby boomers, Quark Pair was a rare exception: a precocious duo of Gen X teenagers who met at Stuyvesant high school in New York. The band was formed by Golan Levin (above left) and Mark Rhodes (above right) during their sophomore year, bonding over a shared interest in electronic music and science. Their two-self-released cassettes were pressed in editions of 500 and were only sold at shows or on consignment at the time and are now scarce.

Levin was an only child, born in 1972 and raised in Staten Island. His parents divorced when he was ten and he stayed with his mother, an abstract expressionist painter. Levin was interested in mathematics and also loved to draw. He got into electronic music via the Eurythmics, whose song "Paint a Rumor" featured an extended electronic section without vocals. "I wanted more music like that," Levin said. "I had a hard time finding instrumental electronic music. I just wanted the machines. Then I went to summer camp and some older guy told me about Tangerine Dream and Jean Michel Jarre."

Rhodes was born in 1971 and grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His father was Lawrence Rhodes, a famous ballet dancer then working at NYU as a teacher and chairman of the dance department. His mother had been a dancer as well. Rhodes had a background in classical music and knew how to play the oboe.

By the time the two met in 1986, Levin was a regular listener of Beta Waves, Craig Kozan's electronic music show on WRSU. Levin had his own synthesizer but was self-taught and unaware of proper playing technique. Instead, he was focused on the technical aspect of the instrument. Once Levin and Rhodes became friends, Levin moved his gear into Rhodes' bedroom, and they had a mini-studio with an Amiga computer, a Korg Poly 800-II, and a Roland JX-3P. They would soon add more.

The two aspiring musicians would sometimes host what they called "sequencer parties" at Rhodes' apartment. "We had a loop on the sequencer, and someone would lay down a monophonic bass line, and then another person would do a different track over the bass line. Then, we'd mute the bass line, and a new person would only listen to second track, like an exquisite corpse. At the end of the evening, we'd listen to all the tracks stacked up. Usually there was something where someone interpreted the song in the wrong key."

The duo picked a name–Quark Pair–and got to work on their debut album Relativity, combining material they had written separately, plus a few songs they wrote together. Levin recalls that they had somewhat different influences, with him drawing more from Jean Michel-Jarre while Rhodes liked Yanni and Mannheim Steamroller. "In retrospect, I don't think I had good taste in music," Levin muses.

Quark Pair's first album was recorded at Patty DeVincentis' studio, Phaze IV, in Union Beach, New Jersey in December 1987. "Patty's boyfriend, Brian Van Korn, was our sound engineer," Levin said. "Mark's Dad drove us down and we recorded the whole thing to DAT. We had already sequenced everything at Mark’s apartment and it only took two days to record. One thing I remember - there was a fragrance factory nearby and outside it smelled like a mixture of aftershave and peach flavoring."

Once the recordings were done, the duo pressed 500 copies of the cassette and sold them on consignment at the new age shop Star Magic, as well as record stores like Bleecker Bob’s. They had been going to electronic music shows already in New Jersey, and they networked with other musicians like Don Slepian and Jesse Clark who were both a part of the Creative Underground collective. Slepian got the kids their first show, playing at the Alternative Music Festival in Hazlet, New Jersey. Their next concert was at NYU, which Mark’s father set up. They invited Slepian and put on a solid show, but it would be their last. "When we played live, we just hit a button," Levin said. "We felt like we were faking it. We performed some simple parts, but it didn’t feel right as a live performance. We stopped performing after that and dug into the studio."

The duo’s next album was the more sophisticated Observatory in 1989, which garnered a review in EAR Magazine that called them "whiz kids" whose music "sits comfortably in the realm of the accessible but remains nonetheless stimulating and exotic." Just before that, they'd been profiled in Keyboard Magazine where their age was again highlighted. Golan remarked, "The older musicians have been really supportive–but we don't tailor music for young or older audiences, we just play and see what happens."

By the time of their second album, Golan and Rhodes were already high school seniors, and the two decided to end the project. Rhodes went on to attend Oberlin College to study in the TIMARA electronic music program and is now a software developer. Levin went to college at MIT to get a degree in media arts, and then obtained a master's degree there in the field of Aesthetics and Computation. He is now a full professor at Carnegie Mellon.

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