Quiet Anthems: An Interview with Eric Quach

Eric Quach, Conqueror. 

By CLINT ENNS October 7, 2025 

Eric Quach is best known as an architect of sonic assaults under the guise of thisquietarmy. His weapon, an electric guitar; his conquest, vast expanses of disintegrating soundscapes. He has released an avalanche of albums with an endless stream of collaborations, touring landscapes long forgotten by the industrial music machine. In addition to these textured sonic landscapes, Quach transforms his world into image.

In 2017, Quach unveiled Conqueror, a collection of frozen moments; photographs taken along the endless march of tours, a silent testament to his ongoing journey. The book promises “an anthropological glimpse” into Quach’s odyssey. Within its pages, his images hum with the pulse of decay, capturing landscapes haunted by their unseen histories. Black-and-white—raw and scarred, these photos are less a window and more a reflection of entropy, suspended in time. Accompanying this tome is a 7" flexi-disc placing it somewhere between art book and band merch.

Like his music, his photographs are spectres caught in the collapse of a fading empire. You stand at the edge, looking out across the ruins of a world unravelling slowly, steadily. Everything feels suspended in the stillness of a forgotten moment, abandoned by time, haunted by absence. Each image is a distant echo buried beneath layers of dense noise, quiet anthems to a world that once was, a long-lost signal from another time.

This interview was conducted by e-mail and collaboratively edited into its current form. 

Eric Quach, Conqueror. 

CE: Your work resonates with a particular Montréal-ethos, especially in the aesthetics often linked to Constellation Records and the early 2000s music scene. I’m not suggesting that your art is rooted in the past or bound to a singular aesthetic from that time—but the echoes remain. How do you see yourself in relation to this scene?

EQ: I am definitely a fan of Constellation Records and their DIY, anti-capitalist ethics. In the late 90s, everything “alternative” seemed extroverted, obnoxious, and narcissistic. Entering a loft where a small group of people were sitting in the dark listening to twenty minute songs played live made me aware of a whole other universe of art, sound, and aesthetics that were light-years away from the mainstream media. And this was within my own city. I could identify with the anti-rock, anti-theatrical, anti-hero attitude which opened up a new world of possibilities.

At that time, the division of Anglo and Franco music scenes was still very present. Constellation Records was mostly affiliated with the Anglo music scene, a hub for expat artists coming from various parts of Canada and the US. Being native to Montréal, I didn’t see the city as a cheap idyllic city full of potential with tons of abandoned space, but as remnants of a failed referendum now occupied by expats artists. They were starting their lives over in a city that didn’t rightfully belong to them, but that they made it their own—right under our noses while we were living deep into our own Montréal/Québec darkness, dramas, and disagreements: the economy was disastrous, the politics were awful, our sports teams were losing, our lives were depressing, and to make things worse...the Anglos weren’t acknowledging us. Yet, it wasn’t envy, it was a beacon of hope emerged in our unique island-city. It inspired us to create.

CE: What do you see as the influence of Montréal's artistic landscape on your visual approach?

EQ: Working with Where Are My Records (which was affiliated with a francophone indie music zine called emoRAGEi Magazine) was particularly eye-opening. The label had a visual aesthetic more rooted in photography and landscapes which had ethereal, poetic, and melancholic qualities. The bands on the label were sonically less angry, more sensitive, more dreamy.

Destroyalldreamers approached Patrick Lacharité [from Below The Sea and WAMR’s graphic designer and audio consultant] to help us produce our first album, which was recorded in his home studio/apartment in the Plateau. We collaborated together on the design of the album. Beyond the graphic work, we used an ambiguous image to capture the absurdity of the album’s abstract title “À coeur léger sommeil sanglant,” [“Lighthearted Bloody Sleep”]—a cut apple wrapped in a thick brown string. This cover was a crash course in digital photography and graphic design.

CE: In the beginning, you captured moments through the lens of a simple point-and-shoot. As time passed, that device gave way to another which offers a different form of immediacy, the smartphone. Did this technological shift alter the way you saw the world through the frame? Did it change the way you took photos?

EQ: When I’m on tour I have a lot of equipment and I often travel alone, so the smartphone is a convenient tool to document and capture everything I am living through.

More than the camera, Instagram and social media have changed my relationship to photography. For instance, I went from posting single photographs to curating galleries which are able to express a story.

Eric Quach, Conqueror. 

CE: The photographs in Conqueror are both diaristic and a stylized form of tourist photography, perhaps, tour-istic photographs, but they also feel estranged. Is it the hidden, unfamiliar histories that appeal to you?

EQ: I tour in order to perform music outside of Montréal. On the road, I like to be hosted since this provides an opportunity to see how other people live: their habits, their surroundings, their food, their interests, their politics. Meeting people from all walks of life who shares different perspectives but who share a common interest: music. What you call “touristy” is, to me, merely an attempt to catch a glimpse of another culture, another way of life, an opportunity to actually meet and get to know different people. 

CE: Contemporary photography is often a way to simply relieve boredom or to distract from loneliness. Tourist photography is often a way to relieve some of the anxiety of being in an unfamiliar place, a way to mediate the experience, a way to distance oneself from reality. Do you see the act of taking diaristic photographs as a way to transform one’s life into a work of art or is it a way to relieve boredom/aniexity?

EQ: All photography captures a moment in time. Sometimes the photograph is of a monument or a piece of architecture that has been standing for centuries and sometimes the photograph captures a fleeting event, one that has only existed for a fraction of a second.  

I often take a photograph in order to capture a feeling. In editing the photograph, I want to reveal the emotions that triggered me to take the photograph. The impulse, an electrical signal sent from deep inside, the awakening from a dead state, a desire linked to survival, an inspiration of hope, a stimulation of the senses. I am not necessarily trying to capture a faithful representation of the subject.

I don’t take photos out of boredom, I am trying to capture the excitement and the frenzy of events that I am living through. This is one of the problems with photography, it can distract from the immediate enjoyment of an event. I sometimes prioritize the memory of that event rather than living in the moment. The payoff is that these images have the potential to capture something greater than simply “enjoying the moment.”

Eric Quach, Conqueror. 

CE: Susan Sontag’s reflections on photography unveil a stark critique of touristic imagery suggesting ways the practice can be deeply problematic. She sees the act of photographing as one of appropriation, a way to impose one’s own presence upon the world and thus claiming a form of power and knowledge. Every click of the shutter asserts dominion over the captured space, a way for tourists to tame and possess the unfamiliar. Can you talk about the title of your book Conqueror in relation to Sontag’s critique?  

EQ: The title Conqueror is a reference to my first solo album Unconquered. At the time, I was working in a new medium, one that I had yet to master. It was also a reference to my artist name thisquietarmy which I envision as a journey, as the start of a long series of battles. Every completed work felt like a victory. Conqueror takes that same concept and applies it to touring where every performance, every concert, every city or country played and thus every moment was a conquest. In the context of photography, every snapshot is a trophy, a souvenir, a memento of that achievement. Am I imposing, appropriating, conquering the subjects of my photographs? Yes, of course, but not in the way Sontag claims. These are personal, not political, victories. WM