The Counterfictionals: An Incomplete Encyclopedia of Gentle Emotions

Any hardcore film buff will tell you that plot is not really what is important—or as the estimable critic Roger Ebert often said, the thing is "not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it." This is a lesson Kristoffer Rosing-Schow and The Counterfictionals have indeed taken to heart. Their pieces are mostly modeled after inspirations from the world of cinema, but those specific sources are only jumping-off spots. The point of each piece is not which particular film or scene it might be themed around, but how they evoke the encompassing mood and emotional heart behind it.

In the steps of the kaleidoscopic No Hay Banda (Good Music, 2019), the sextet again spins a series of bewitching somber-jazz noirs, although this outing leans impressionistic rather than being specifically referential. For example, the concept behind the opening track is a hypothetical movie that has never been made. It weaves a ghostly rainy-day melodrama with theremin, lightly sweeping strings and out-of-phase guitar under a freeform snippet of James Joyce, and the experience comes out no less immersive for the source being (well) fictional. It is perfectly easy to imagine this whole collection as a mini-series of tapes that were made for some golden-age arthouse project and lost behind a dusty wooden crate in the editing suite.

Like countless scores out there, An Incomplete Encyclopedia of Gentle Emotions is packed with a palette of tones well beyond basic piano, guitars and reeds. The tension of a tragic Quentin Tarantino love/non-love story is portrayed in a dirge with mournful clarinet and a little melodica adding a tinge of Ennio Morricone-esque drama. For a portrait of Being John Malkovich's main characters feeling lost and adrift, a central piano line walks along while its surroundings gradually get less strange, drifting from unsettled chimes to calmer flute and sax (even though an ethereal theremin wave still hangs in to the end). The emotions here might not turn out to always be so gentle after all, although a beautiful and mostly-soothing gypsy tango based around one of the prettiest love stories of the '90s (if not all time) is reassuring enough to show that the album's title mostly fits.

If Encyclopedia is missing anything from the band's debut, it would be the occasional dose of levity. That heartwarming love song aside, the album consistently stays haunting and gloomy—not for the sake of obvious drama, but to face these often-bittersweet themes with the honesty they deserve. When things close with a trance-like homage to two masters of the eerie, the band treats the real as a key to the unreal, showing that a well-built mood piece can make simple clarinet and strings sound as mysterious as any electronic gimmick out there. At tidy LP length, this is a work that feels over surprisingly soon, yet—as with so many of the best-crafted films—it is packed with detail and with many surprising layers to discover.