Jules Reidy, the Berlin-based guitarist, crafts intimate songs that evoke the ecstatic liminality of surrendering to love. Their music is marked by dissonance and tension, blending serene melodies with unpredictable rhythms and textures. Reidy’s voice, filtered through Auto-Tune, is mapped onto the familiar structure of equal temperament, while their custom-built electric guitar plays in just intonation. This unconventional instrument, with frets scattered like the holes in an antique computer’s punch card, creates a unique tension—two overlapping, slightly misaligned scales disrupt the music, producing a shimmering interference effect that challenges the listener’s sense of pitch and time.
On their latest album, Ghost/Spirit (Thrill Jockey), Reidy’s musical style shifts between genres. At times, their guitar playing recalls the cycling arpeggios of John Fahey, but other moments are minimal, cryptic, and pointillistic. This transformation largely depends on whether Reidy uses their 12-string acoustic or their microtonal electric guitar. Equipped with a hexaphonic pickup system that treats each string as a separate output, every note from Reidy’s guitar seems to resonate from a different space, enveloping the listener in an immersive, strange soundscape.
While World in World (2022), Reidy’s previous song-based album, focused more on their guitar, Ghost/Spirit puts their voice front and center. The album introduces a vibrant array of samples, synth tones, and electronic textures, including bowed strings, xylophones, trombones, accordion, and intricate percussion. Many of these samples are from collaborators such as bassist Andreas Dzialocha, cellist Judith Hamann, sound artist Weston Olencki, and drummers Morten Joh and Sara Neidorf, though pinpointing who contributed to each section is nearly impossible. The songs on Ghost/Spirit often feature vocal melodies layered over synth chords or drones, but they are frequently disrupted by bursts of bass, feedback, and chaotic hi-hat rhythms, keeping the music in constant flux. What remains steady is constantly upended by what is unstable, and harmony often gives way to discord.
Lyrically, Reidy delves into themes of ego death through love, both divine and earthly. The experience of surrender, transformation, and transcendence finds expression in the songs, where the listener is suspended in a state of ecstatic liminality. Reidy’s lyrics reflect this delicate balance: “All I have for you / All the love and fear / Too close they overlap / Too loud for me to hear,” they sing on “Spirit.”
In live performances, Reidy augments their setup with a laptop, a 14-channel mixer, several effects pedals, and a looper. They also incorporate an eight-pad electronic percussion trigger, played with a drumstick in their pick hand, adding another layer to their experimental performances. Even without being present, the ethereal multitudes of Ghost/Spirit seem to hang in the air as their music envelopes and transforms the space around them.
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