Canadian writer Anne Carson, whom Jules Reidy has cited as their favorite essayist, recently penned an intriguing review of a Rosalía concert. It’s a fish-out-of-water debrief from a critic skeptical of the singer’s use of spectacular “pop-song procedure” to upscale the emotions of flamenco. But her critique is not in bad faith: Carson rigorously investigates how the Catalan singer’s stage presence—as a hyper-stylized, quasi-religious vessel for ecstatic attention—commands her audience. The essay evaluates an artist’s methodology for contacting and channeling the divine, and a similar curiosity can be found in Reidy’s work. The Berlin-based guitarist seems to anatomize their own music, using complex tuning systems and a patient, cerebral attitude to search for the secrets of its underlying power. Through a yearning harmonic language, Reidy conducts the currents that join schematic musical forms to the subjective feelings they stir up.
Reidy’s last album, 2025’s Ghost/Spirit, was the closest their work has gotten to “pop-song procedure,” with big, shuddering electronics and warbly pitch correction siphoned into singer-songwriter vocals that augmented the guitar. On Clerestory—titled for the windowed upper section of the walls of a church—Reidy steps back from a confessional role and settles into a more behind-the-scenes identity as a composer. “Shadow Symmetric” is a 17-minute piece commissioned and performed by New York’s JACK Quartet, a contemporary chamber ensemble that shares Reidy’s interest in just intonation. Reidy reconfigures the original piece on the five-part “Clerestory Windows” suite via re-arrangement and sampling to refract the quartet’s emotional core into new, crystalline patterns.
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The string quartet is a notoriously difficult ensemble to compose for, because the two violins, viola, and cello are siblings, part of the same timbral family. To give each instrument a chance to shine, a piece must carefully allocate space for adjacent acoustic registers and personalities. Reidy’s guitar discography has explored harmonics, the airy overtones produced by lightly pressing a string at fractions of its length; they help Reidy’s playing feel both pleasantly radiant and cravingly unresolved. The quartet plays two not-quite-identical pitch sets which drift throughout the piece as the players cascade against each other, producing beating interference effects. When chord voicings like those Reidy might have played as a soloist are arranged across four complementary bowed instruments, the music’s cosmic ache can be stretched, sustained, and interwoven with itself. The piece’s gradual dissolution and transformation resemble the arc of ego death. By the conclusion, the upper instruments are reduced to their fragile highest harmonics, and the scrape of horsehair on strings exceeds the ringing of the actual notes, as if the quartet is slowly exhaling to re-ground you in the physical.
Whereas “Shadow Symmetric” is a social exercise, with each player balancing against the other in delicate dialogue, the “Clerestory Windows” suite opts for something more internally reflective. Reidy isn’t afraid to get sappy or new-agey here: “Windows I” reformats the piece in a nostalgic bank of old MIDI string sounds, and on “II” Reidy wanders through a 12-string acoustic folk performance set against the original harmonies, which feel like light streaming into the attic of a childhood home. A 1970s RMI synthesizer on “III” aggravates the intervals’ once-subtle beating sensations to cinematic proportions. Not all of Reidy’s formal explorations enhance Clerestory’s central effects. “Windows V” features Afrobeat-ish guitar polyrhythms, mathematically sequenced with Euclidean step patterns, which puzzle more than they immerse. Still, the familiar harmonic swell’s changing instrumentation keys you into the ways that timbre and tone color direct the mind.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
