#quedronol

Quedronol is a young independent artist hailing from San Francisco who first gained some traction with his Ambient Indie Folk album Fioritura in late 2023. This momentum would continue into 2024 and 2025 where he would make a statement with the release of Together in May. His music is emotional and sincere, blending personal experiences and beautiful melodies to create a bittersweet listening experience. As 2026 approaches, I had a chat with him to discuss his musical journey as well as what the future holds for him.

Kade: Let's start at the beginning. Who is Quedronol?

Quedronol: Quedronol is… I guess the name, the persona I made for myself when I was 11 and wanted to start making music by myself, wanted to start producing. I got Logic Pro pirated. And I've been writing music since I was like 2. That's like pretty much just been like my whole life. That's how I learned how to read from reading the backs of CDs that my dad would play in the car. Then I would start writing my own lyrics in the notes app on my mom's phone. Eventually that turned into learning how to produce and play guitar when I was like 11 or 12.

I just kind of chose the name Quedronol because I don't even know. I don't remember how I came up with that. I remember I was key smashing on a keyboard trying to come up with something and nothing really sticking. So, I just wanted to make it nonsense and wanted to give it no meaning. Today it's kind of a burden because I'm not 11 anymore and I kind of wish I came up with a name that rolls off the tongue better. A lot of people tell me that it's hard to remember or it just sounds like a drug and it doesn't sound representative of what the music is, but it is what it is.

Kade: The first thing I wanted to ask about was the album you put out earlier this year in May called Together. It's got a really sprawling track list with a lot of varied moods throughout. When you started creating the album, did you picture it as one cohesive journey or more like a collection of independent stories?

Quedronol: I guess both, but primarily it was one cohesive thing. It was originally going to be like a hard concept album about; and I don't know, I still might make this album someday; but it was going to be about a man and his horse and their journey from the East Coast of the US to San Francisco, which is where I'm from. It was definitely going to originally be one single vibe. I guess the closest thing to that that's still on the album is the song Picture in Picture. That was kind of what I envisioned, like the whole thing would feel like. But what it turned into was more of a combination of everything that I've associated with sentimentality and comfort. Thematically, it's more tied together than sonically

Kade: You mentioned there about the concept album, about the man with the horse, which makes me think of the note that you posted originally when the album came out. You said in that note that you wrote it for the people that saved your life over the last 18 months. I wanted to ask you, if you don't mind, what those people mean to you and how they helped with the direction of the album?

Quedronol: I started working on this album right after I dropped Fioritura and that was one of the worst moments of my life. That was; I don't even know. I was mostly just riddled by depression and there were a lot of things going on with my friendships at the time and uncertainties. Then over the course of the first few months of 2024, as I started working on the album and writing and trying to find inspiration, I ended up making some friends and getting closer with people who had been in my life for a really long time. Then on top of that, around that time, a close family member died. So all of those things combined just had me thinking about the people in my life a lot more than ever.

That was mostly what the main inspiration was. It just came out of love. It's so corny, which is partly on purpose, but at the end of the day, it was just about how much I loved people and how much I was thankful for people in my life and what they did for me around that time in early 2024, when I was starting to write. Over the course of writing this album, a lot of those friendships stayed, a lot of them didn't last, a lot of them changed. All of those things ended up impacting various tiny lyrics or little moments on the album. Pretty much every moment or shift or lyric is in reference to a different moment, thing, experience, object or person in my life. So, it's very collage-y in that sense. A lot of the songs and the lyrics were put together based on things that happened months apart from each other.

The album eventually became about a group of really close friends who I'm still super close with. Especially around the time the album came out I was really, really thankful for them because they did save my life from early 2024 to mid 2025 and I realised who the people who meant the most to me in my life were; it became clearer and clearer.

Another part of that is the movie that I made for Together, the visualiser, which was the epitome of my realisation that I made over the course of making the record; of who the people in my life were that mattered the most to me and why they mattered so much to me. For that visualiser I made, I invited four people who I wrote a lot of the songs about on a little road trip. I asked my mom if I could borrow her car for a day, and I had to fight for it a little bit. It took like six months to plan, but we ended up making it to this spot that I had in mind called Wilbur's Watch, which is down in Pescadero, California. It's like a really small town, and I think Wilbur's Watch is like a weird little tourist attraction around there. It's this lighthouse. That lighthouse, that destination, and having a day where I could drive my friends somewhere and show them the album. That ended up being a beacon for me while I was working on the album.

That was part of the realisation, the eventual kind of moment where I started to understand what the album was all about. It's really weird how I wrote those songs over the course of like a year. The first one that I made was the title track, which I made around March 2024, and it was about one of my best friends and a specific moment with him. It was really interesting to see how a lot of this stuff that I was writing about really early on when I had nothing about the record or even my life on a larger scale figured out, a lot of that was recontextualised and clarified the more I lived and experienced. The person that the song Together is about was on the road trip with me and was all over the visualizer for it. They took us to this really good burrito spot in Pescadero, and it was so gas. I'll never forget that.

Kade: Speaking of the visualisers, you also had one for your previous album [Fioritura] and a lot of the tracks that you write and release almost seem like they could belong to a film soundtrack. Have you ever thought about the possibility of scoring a film, whether that's a short film run by an indie production, or any other type of visual medium outside of your albums?

Quedronol: Yeah, I really want to, and that's really true about Fioritura. I kind of had visuals in mind over the time I was making it, and it started to feel like I was trying to make music that embodied a place. I don't know, that's always meant a lot to me on all of my albums, trying to make music that feels like a place that you can see. In that sense, all of my music is trying to be a score or a soundtrack.

Fioritura was about this place right by my grandparents' old house, this pasture. So, that became the basis for the entire album. For Together, it was the 280 that runs from San Francisco down to San Mateo. So, both of those albums were directly inspired by places and things that I saw in those places.

For all of the music I've been making since I got to college, which was earlier this year, I haven't had the chance really to record vocals. I’ve also just been kind of demotivated to write lyrics and vocals. The vast majority of what I've been making is instrumental. I’ve been meeting a lot of people here who want to make movies or are going to school for film. It's been really cool to see other people also really see the music as film score music, or just something that could soundtrack a visual, have a loop.

Kade: Speaking of more instrumentals, on your previous album, Fioritura, there's a lot more ambient influences, it feels like. How did your creative mindset or intentions change between that album and Together?

Quedronol: I think for the ambience, it honestly comes back to the same visual element of the music that was talking about. The ambient influences that I have are definitely the same on both albums, but I think they came through on Fioritura more just because the atmosphere of it was so much slower. To me, Fioritura feels like sitting in one place and taking it in and understanding it deeply, whereas Together feels way more transitory, as if you're moving along a highway. I think the ambience that comes through in Fioritura was inspired a lot by the [pasture] and how slow I felt when making it too. I think I wanted the album to feel like it was washing over you. It was really like enveloping, and that helped a lot.

Kade: Another thing about the creative process was the fact that you seem to handle most of it yourself, from the writing to the producing, to the mixing and mastering. I wanted to ask you what the biggest challenges are, but also the most rewarding parts are of being a DIY artist?

Quedronol: That is something that I've been reconciling a lot the past few months, being in college and like meeting a ton of people who I want to work with. It's not really something that I've ever had the option of. So, I think I've kind of been bred since I was born, since I started writing music in the first place. I've kind of taught myself to do things independently and do things by myself, for better or for worse, because there's so many times where I've wished I could outsource or not even outsource parts of the creative process, but be able to take in other people's ideas. I think that's just something that I've never really let myself get used to or had the opportunity to do.

It's hard for me to do that, over the internet, which is up until now, pretty much the only thing I've had access to in terms of collaboration. It's a lot easier to do that in person when you have resources and ideas right there. So, lately I've been kind of reconciling why I haven't collaborated with other people that much. And it's been really fun to start to get better at that, at least in terms of the creative process. As far as the other aspects of the music and putting out music, like marketing and the graphic design that comes with it and stuff. I've definitely gotten used to just doing all that myself because of a lack of knowing people pretty much. That's definitely changed recently just because I've been meeting a ton of people who are way better at graphic design than me and way better at painting and way better at marketing for sure.

There is something that I'm still like really proud of. It makes me feel happier with the final product when it's, you know, something that I can say I was fully my vision from start to finish like in terms of Together. The other two albums, both of the album covers were shot by my brother and that picture from Fioritura was actually taken in like 2013 or something like that, when he was first getting into photography. I didn't discover it until like two months before Fioritura came out. There was no album cover for it. So that was one of the few times that I kind of saw something else that just embodied what I wanted and kind of sampled it together.

The same thing for the visualiser on Fioritura. My friend Levi, who was so talented, shot that entire visualiser and we talked for a super long time about exactly what we wanted it to look like. That was kind of my first experience with letting other people in on creative aspects of the music. And it was really sick because it did make it feel more like a movie, like I was just one part of this whole thing that we were making together. It wasn't like the music was the main focus, but it was all one thing together, one cohesive thing. So that kind of changed my perspective on the large-scale collaboration with people, especially when I know people who are more talented at a certain thing than I am. Like Levi was an obvious choice for when I was trying to figure out how to make a visualiser like a movie for Fioritura because I've known her for a really long time and her photography is unbelievable to me.

Then for Together, I kind of did the opposite approach. Like I said, it was so personal to me and about people in my life and what they meant to me that I kind of wanted it to feel more like a gift or something when I was releasing it. And in order to do that, I kind of got controlling over it. Now I realise that I think Together would have come out even better if I had let other people in on it especially in the recording and especially in the visualising because that thing is really tapped together. It was super fun to make but I think it didn't really do anything for my final vision of the record. The only feature on the whole album is Paddy, thisfindsyou, on Starry night, which is such an amazing feature and also something that I was really reluctant to have on the album because the album was pretty much done. Paddy was one of the only people who heard it while I was working on it and I showed him everything  pretty much that I would make. He became one of the biggest inspirations.

First of all, his music that he made as Clovehitch is some of my favorite music ever. It's been like that since 2022. So, when we connected for the first time on Instagram, it was kind of insane to me because they were such an inspiration. But when they wanted to, when we were talking about the final vision for the album in the last few months of making it, there was still no feature or anything planned, but I did want to show my appreciation somehow for how much impact they had on the record from start to finish. So they brought up in April or maybe late March of 2025 of this year that one of the last things that they really didn't feel felt finished was Starry night because the whole plan from the beginning was to have Starry night end with three minutes of instrumental pretty much exactly the same as it is now, just without any vocals at all. So, I started showing the album to more people around that time because I was pretty confident in how complete it was. Then that came up repeatedly as a thing that just didn't feel quite finished.

So, Paddy was obviously the person that was going to feature on it. As I said earlier, I was hesitant to do that just because I did every single thing on Together. There wasn't a single other person who helped, who did production or anything like that. It was really just feedback that I got from my friends, particularly the people I was writing the songs about, and also from Paddy and other people on the internet who I would show a song or two. After Paddy was working on that feature for a while, it really showed me and became such an important part of the album to me, just because of not only Paddy's involvement from the beginning, but also how it feels special to have some form of collaboration on the final album.

It showed me that the album can still feel super personal to me, and still feel really like my own and my gift to other people, while also not being 100% by me. Which was something that I only started to reconcile with when I was done with the album, because that feature from thisfindsyou, we finished that together on the day that I submitted the album to streaming, which I think was May 4th, 2025, less than a month before the album even dropped and two days before I announced it.

So yeah, it really didn't give me that much time to reconcile what it changed about my approach to art. But now that I'm here, I feel like I've changed my view on collaboration with them anyway.

Kade: Building off of the discussion about collaboration, are there any artists that you think you might like to collaborate with down the line, whether that's necessarily in reach or not?

Quedronol: Okay, anyone at all. First and foremost, I do want to collab with thisfindsyou, obviously, because I think they're so talented. The stuff that they're working on right now is unbelievable. zayok is someone that I've made a ton of stuff with before, but never really anything like ground up kind of beginning. And back when we did collab a lot, it was the beginning of both of us like figuring out our shit I think and figuring out what we were good at. He's one of the most talented people ever. It's been crazy to see how much he's grown. He dropped an album earlier this year called In elsewhere. That was insane. I just want to keep working with him. Later down the line, especially.

People who aren't in reach. I want to... I mean, this is definitely not in reach because he's not alive, but the filmmaker, Edward Yang, I wanted to make a film score for one of his movies. That was also a huge inspiration for Together, like all of his movies, Yi Yi, especially. Something that I want to do down the line is make an album adaptation of Yi Yi, because that movie means so much to me. But anyways, underscores, obviously. She’s such a big inspiration, but I don't think that's doable. But she is from San Francisco, just like me, which I think is kind of insane. And she's kind of been the starting point for a lot of my music, since I was like 14 or 13. I discovered her for the first time from Fishmonger. Yeah, it would be really sick, I think, but that's not going to happen.

Kade: You never know.

Quedronol: Oh, that's true. You never know. I don't know, maybe.

Kade: Talking more about the future of your music, is there any genres or sounds or styles that you'd like to approach and try out?

Quedronol: Yeah, for sure. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that I feel like I've tried once or twice, but just haven't committed to or explored fully or just seeing how much I can do with it. Like I feel like Together was experimenting in a lot of ways, especially on Deruta ricco, which was the first time I ever; or it wasn't the first time I made anything like trap or jerk influenced, but it was like the first time I thought it was good enough to put it out. So I do want to do more stuff like that. That's always been like a huge influence for me, but I've never really made it.

Also, I've been obsessed with ambient country lately. For the past few months, it's like the most specific random shit I've been into, but the environments and vibe of that style of ambient music is so sick to me. I want to make more country influenced stuff in general. It's big. I feel like the atmosphere that you can make with the country instrumentation is so sick and you can do so much with it. I'm trying to make some hillbilly music and also like Bakersfield sounding stuff. Then to be able to have ambient country incorporated into the stuff that I was doing with noise and drone music before.

Kade: One final thing, over the next 12 months, if you could achieve three things, whether that's musically or personally, what would you like those to be?

Quedronol: That's such a good question, bro.

Number one is to make a short film or a music video and have it be high quality and collaborative with people who are talented in the ways that I'm not.

Number two is to start playing more shows. I played my first concert ever like a month or two ago, and it was really fun, but I want to do that on a larger scale. I want to get better at performing.

Then, number three, I think I just want to feel more secure in making music. I want to feel more confident that I can do that long term and do it. I want to do everything I can to make myself feel like music is my thing. Like music can be what I'm going for. Maybe I should rephrase that. I don't know. My number three thing is to feel as confident in my music as I possibly can and make it a long-term of a part of my life as much as possible.

Kade: Well, thank you so much for your time!