Jules Reidy’s music feels like a private language. Its carefully voiced chords and patiently arranged forms imply an underlying structure, a kind of musical grammar. Its fingerpicking suggests a common lineage with the American primitive guitar tradition of John Fahey, as if both were branches of the same tree. Yet something about Reidy’s music remains untranslatable. Its richly unconventional tunings, according to the system known as just intonation, slip the bounds of ordinary 12-tone intervals. Its nagging repetition thwarts standard melodic forms. And the Australian-born, Berlin-based artist’s Auto-Tuned vocals, submerged low in the mix, are all but indecipherable. Their work is too rigorously structured to be called “abstract”; even at its most cryptic, it’s clearly expressing something. But what? You grasp for names that might fit Reidy’s elusive emotional register, searching in vain for an affective Rosetta Stone. The music feels both warmly familiar and uncomfortably alien; therein lies its power.
Over time, their music has steadily expanded, growing outward from a busy amalgam of strumming and picking. It took on new textures, elements, and forms, challenging what “guitar music” could be. Auto-Tune came to the fore; their playing sprawled across side-long suites. On last year’s World in World, they explored shorter, more sketch-like pieces that placed the focus back on their guitar playing. But on their new album Trances, they reverse course, distilling all their ideas into their most potent composition yet. As a single piece of music divided into two parts on vinyl and Bandcamp (despite the 12 track markers noted on Spotify and Apple Music), there is only a single break in the music, halfway through the album’s 44-minute run. It is immersive and overwhelming, a bewitching synthesis of folk and ambient drone that is both beautiful and unsettling.
Trances opens with a tentative strum—four notes in quick succession, bristling like the hairs on a dog’s back—wreathed in a broad, shimmering haze. New chords periodically blossom across the stereo field, branching outward like frost crystals filmed in stop motion. Their harmonies are not dissonant, exactly; “dissonance” implies an unwanted clash of sounds, whereas these are sleek and glassy and weirdly pleasing to the ear. But they are unusual in the extreme, and in that peculiarity opens up a vast expanse of possibility. Just as the theory of dark matter posits a hitherto unknown something lurking in plain sight, Reidy’s nitid tone clusters indicate hidden dimensions layered in between everyday, shopworn harmonies. Rushing white noise, like the roar of surf, occasionally surges underneath, suggesting a fantastical landscape bathed in palladous light.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
