About
Quantum, and the fork in the branch.
Pronounced KWAN-tyne. I'm Mike Arnold — Las Vegas kid, Florida now — and this is where the music comes from: the name, the voice notes, the years before it, and what I'm making right now.
The name
Quantum comes from the Latin quantus — how much — and in physics it's the smallest piece of something that can still exist on its own. Tyne is an old English word for a branch, a fork, the spot where one path turns into two.
Stick them together and you get a small, exact spark that opens a new path. That's what I'm trying to do every time I sit down: get the detail right, then let it go somewhere.
The story
I'm Mike Arnold. I grew up in Las Vegas, I live in Florida now, and I make music as QUANTYNE — mostly dubstep, house and trance, with some techno and the occasional drum & bass track when a song wants it.
Music started for me with hip-hop. As a teenager in Vegas I was doing street rap, and I made exactly one song. One. After that came years of making things on and off — experiments, half-finished ideas, stuff nobody heard — while I tried to teach myself real instruments, piano first. Electronic music is where all of that finally turned into something I could actually finish and put my name on.
“It starts with my own voice. A hook I hummed in the car. A line I said into my phone at two in the morning so I wouldn't lose it.”
Here's how most of it gets made: it starts with my own voice. Voice notes. A hook I hummed in the car. A line I said into my phone at two in the morning so I wouldn't lose it. I take that recording and bend it — change the pitch, change the texture, sometimes change it into a completely different voice — until it fits the song, and then I build the beat under it. The whole first album, THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE, was made that way.
I'm not making background music. There's a message in these songs — not a slogan, more like the kind of thing you'd want to hear from someone who's been through something and came out the other side. If you want to feel something when you listen, this is for you. House, techno, electronic, dance — whatever you call it, if you can vibe to it, you're the person I made it for.
What's next
Right now I've got 15 to 20 new songs in the works. About ten of them are already up on SoundCloud in rough form — that's where things land first, before they're finished — and some of those will get mixed down into the next album.
There's stranger stuff coming too. I've been recording myself doing Gregorian chant. There's a song where I literally sing a toast to your life. And further out, there's a nine-song autobiographical record called The Human Signal Series that I've been building toward for a while.