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Smokey Emery, "Soundtracks for Invisibility Vol. III: Qui Mal y Pense"
Recorded between California, Texas, and England, Qui Mal y Pense reissues one of Smokey Emery's (Daniel Hipólito) most complex and nuanced works, and the third in his Soundtracks for Invisibility series. Created entirely from hand manipulated open reel tapes, it is a lush, dramatic series of compositions that would work very well as a true soundtrack, but are just fine as stand alone music.
The brief introductory "01" is all sci-fi noises and echoes over a soft ambient passage, but the remainder of the album embraces the latter more than the former, which was a smart decision, as the pseudo '60s electronic sound is overused to say the least.The nearly 31 minute "05" also heavily emphasizes ambient spaciousness, mixing sustained electronics and a buried, ragged melody.It is not all that dynamic, but expands, dense and menacing, with only the most fragmented of melodies slipping out.
Even though this release was constructed mostly from processed magnetic tape, it sounds as if traditional instruments manage to slip through from the original source material, such as the simple guitar melodies on "Afore."Bathed in reverb, Hipólito builds walls of reverb around the guitar, slipping into ugly noise in its closing minutes.A guitar (or sound-alike instrument) also appears on "The Room Falls Away" with tremolo heavy electronic expanses.It is comparatively simple in its construction, but no less captivating.
What sounds like mangled, bowed strings contrast a dour melody on "04," the dissonant and melodic pair conveying sadness on the first half, and then foreboding menace on the second.The paring of the two extremes also helps to define "02," with drifting bassy electronics mixed with spiny, acidic bits of noise to offset them, resulting in a piece of creaking moodiness and heavy reverb.
Even though it was constructed with such a basic strategy, Daniel Hipólito extracts a world of sounds and atmospheres out of those old spools of magnetic tape.What could just be a mundane collection of loops is instead a cinematic expanse of sound, mysterious and oblique in its abstraction.The final product though, befittingly presented on cassette tape, carries just the right amount of mystery to unravel in its gauzy layers.
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