Jules Reidy's music feels like a private language. Its carefully enunciated chords and patiently arranged forms suggest an underlying structure, a kind of musical grammar. His fingering suggests a common ancestry with the American primitive guitar tradition of John Fahey, as if they were both branches of the same tree. Yet something about Reidy's music remains untranslated. Its rich unconventional resonances, according to the system known as just emphasis, slip the limits of the usual 12-ton intervals. Its moaning repetition subverts typical melodic forms. And the Australian-born, Berlin-based artist's Auto-Tuned vocals, submerged low in the mix, are all inexplicable. Their work is too tightly structured to be called “abstract”. even at its most cryptic, it expresses itself clearly something. But what? You come up with names that might fit Reidy's elusive emotional register, searching in vain for an emotional Rosetta Stone. The music is both familiar and uncomfortably foreign. therein lies its power.
Over time, their music has steadily expanded, evolving outwards from a busy mix of jamming and picking. It took on new textures, elements and forms, questioning what “guitar music” could be. Auto-Tune came to the fore. their game spread to side suites. Last year World in the world, they explored shorter, sketch-like pieces that put the focus back on their guitar playing. But on their new album Trans, they reverse course, distilling all their ideas into their strongest line-up to date. As a single piece of music split into two parts on vinyl and Bandcamp (despite the 12-track markers noted on Spotify and Apple Music), there's only one break in the music, halfway through the 44-minute album. It's haunting and overwhelming, a mesmerizing blend of folk and ambient drone that's both beautiful and unsettling.
Trans opens with a tentative acre—four notes in quick succession, bristling like the hairs on a dog's back—crowned in a wide, shimmering haze. New chords periodically bloom across the stereo field, branching outward like frost crystals filmed in stop motion. Their harmonies aren't dissonant, exactly. “Dissonance” suggests an unwanted clash of sounds, while these are sleek and glassy and strangely pleasing to the ear. But they are unusual in the extreme, and in this peculiarity opens up a vast expanse of possibilities. Just as the theory of dark matter poses a hitherto unknown something lurking in plain sight, Reidy's nitid tone clusters suggest hidden dimensions amid everyday, worn-out harmonies. Rushing white noise, like the roar of the surf, occasionally erupts from below, suggesting a fantastical landscape bathed in bright light.
