Smokey Emery – Quartz EP

Pressing of 300 on thick 7″ black vinyl, heavy art cardstock duotone b&w “disaster” collage fold-out covers by Smokey Emery himself…

Smokey Emery’s Quartz EP is a bona fide document of sonorities from the purgatorial regions. Distorted and catchy tape loops that take you from the inter-planes of the mind to the carnival, where the festivities seem at once sinister and endearing beneath the changing light of sooty reverb and effectual tape hiss. These deceptive washes of underwater tones falling in and out of tune are placid enough to meditate to though also project a menacing, even premonitory air. Unlike many drone kingdom tape-loop albums, there is also enough substance and subtly here to sharpen your mind against – just when you think you’ve been listening to a stable phrase for 30 seconds you perceive, buried in the glowing embers and vapor, a yawning organ concerto or an analogue gear malfunction rescued into exquisite loop patterning. Over continuous listens a depth of elements continually rise from the initially dark and watery abyss to the grey-scaled and disorienting surface.

This music is as much evocative of the sharp winter cold as it is the mirages of summer heat, the murky deep as much as the smoggy zenith, and the charming mechanics of dusty analogue gear as much as a honed sense of intuitive craftsmanship directed toward allaying arrangements of saturated sonic material. Quartz reads the ambiance of the nether world through the split light of the celestial sphere. So much wickedness and tenderness.