JOE CARDAMONE elaborates why Love Is Hell on QUARENTINA

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.

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.”