I imagine Daniel Hipólito arching over over a card table of face-up cassette tapes, running his fingertips over the shells in search of his next selection from among the thrifted holiday tunes, tropicalia mixtapes, Middle Eastern vocal pop cassingles, or short-run noise burners. Memories of scrounging these tapes from cobwebbed bins under counters or in crawlspaces have faded in comparison to his memories of their subsequent afterlives, sampled, stretched, or recast as drones or textural beds in his interdisciplinary compositions. On its path from his headspace to the play head of your tape deck, the music that Hipólito makes under the Smokey Emery moniker bears witness to years of collection, recombination, and field recording — all in pursuit of more raw material to mulch through creative processes and sympathetic machines into (in) [per] {re} versions of that first experience.
Soundtracks for Invisibility Vol. III: Qui Mal y Pense returns to print on cassette via Austin’s own Holodeck Records after a small edition on CDr in 2011. Its pieces rumble at a nearly imperceptible pace over expanses of low-end tone whose context and method of creation have been abstracted beyond easy identification: tape manipulated drift? effected guitar? synth? As the ambience compounds and the hands of the clock harden at right angles, the legible guitar lines of “Afore” creep out of the haze, as if to remind you of the existence of humankind. Ah, yeah, those people. Sometimes their hands touch strings, and sometimes their hands press buttons. They make their selections and fill as much of their lives as they can tolerate with something to hear other than the sound of their own breathing. They lay down in their beds at night, they think back on the day, and they remember it all wrong already.
As Smokey Emery bids you retreat into your brain’s fading reconstitution of a specific moment in a specific location all alone inside your specific body, what are we to make of this one here? The video for “Afore” offers imagery that we can’t place anywhere else, and can’t stop watching. Fingertips spray blood and extend into daggers. The bulb rises down the center of the chiasmus. The audio and the visual share an interdisciplinary root, funneling source materials through effects and filters and emerging with a layered composite rendered baroque by way of the dub. We are rooted to the spot for as long as the mudras and the arpeggios can hold us.
• Smokey Emery: http://smokeyemery.tumblr.com
• Holodeck Records: http://holodeckrecords.com
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