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CD
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THRILL 618CD
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"Jules Reidy's sublime music maps the human experience in glittering constellations of sound. The guitarist is a driver of Berlin's fertile contemporary music scene. A wide-eyed imagination combined with technical mastery guide each work in Reidy's extensive catalog, from solo guitar albums and collaborations with innovative peers, including recent works with claire rousay, Oren Ambarchi, Andrea Belfi, and Sam Dunscombe to major commissions from JACK Quartet and Zinc & Copper. The songs of Ghost/Spirit collectively convey an astral sense of yearning and wonder, pushing towards transcendence. The album charts a deeply personal journey with love, spirituality and transformation expressed in fractal guitar figures, ethereal vocal vapors and rippling microtones. Reidy's guitar approach unlocks the tonal and textural possibilities of the instrument from their use of alternate tunings and astute processing. The maximalist melodics of album opener 'Every Day There's a Sunset' are bolstered by rumbling bass samples from Andreas Dzialocha, Reidy's collaborator in the duo Sun Kit. On 'Satellite,' cello samples from Judith Hamann stretch out through the cosmos, orbited by spiraling finger-picked guitars, while stacked trombone chords echo out into the ether. Thundering drum samples from Berlin metal mainstay Sara Neidorf push the album to ecstatic peaks on 'Every Day There's a Sunrise,' fragmented rhythms breaking apart in the atmosphere. Field recordings of the Berlin S-Bahn recur throughout the album, another endless cycle of leaving and returning that shuttles beneath the album's whirling tones. Ghost/Spirit captures the inherent power and agency in choosing to offer yourself up to the universe and let go, ego death and prayer rendered in incandescent sonics. Reidy's inimitable skill as a guitarist, producer and composer is on full display, and when combined with the intensity of experience, the resulting album is a remarkable work of art.
"Jules Reidy is another musician transforming the capabilities of an instrument, in this case the guitar -- somewhere between Vini Reilly, Glenn Branca and Kevin Shields." --The Guardian
"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." --Pitchfork
"Like looking through a tinted window then trying to adjust to the world's normal colours. It's brilliant." --The Quietus
"[Their] music offers an intricate sonic tapestry of fingerstyle guitar, found sounds and spectral electronic drone." -- Crack
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LP
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THRILL 618LP
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LP version. "Jules Reidy's sublime music maps the human experience in glittering constellations of sound. The guitarist is a driver of Berlin's fertile contemporary music scene. A wide-eyed imagination combined with technical mastery guide each work in Reidy's extensive catalog, from solo guitar albums and collaborations with innovative peers, including recent works with claire rousay, Oren Ambarchi, Andrea Belfi, and Sam Dunscombe to major commissions from JACK Quartet and Zinc & Copper. The songs of Ghost/Spirit collectively convey an astral sense of yearning and wonder, pushing towards transcendence. The album charts a deeply personal journey with love, spirituality and transformation expressed in fractal guitar figures, ethereal vocal vapors and rippling microtones. Reidy's guitar approach unlocks the tonal and textural possibilities of the instrument from their use of alternate tunings and astute processing. The maximalist melodics of album opener 'Every Day There's a Sunset' are bolstered by rumbling bass samples from Andreas Dzialocha, Reidy's collaborator in the duo Sun Kit. On 'Satellite,' cello samples from Judith Hamann stretch out through the cosmos, orbited by spiraling finger-picked guitars, while stacked trombone chords echo out into the ether. Thundering drum samples from Berlin metal mainstay Sara Neidorf push the album to ecstatic peaks on 'Every Day There's a Sunrise,' fragmented rhythms breaking apart in the atmosphere. Field recordings of the Berlin S-Bahn recur throughout the album, another endless cycle of leaving and returning that shuttles beneath the album's whirling tones. Ghost/Spirit captures the inherent power and agency in choosing to offer yourself up to the universe and let go, ego death and prayer rendered in incandescent sonics. Reidy's inimitable skill as a guitarist, producer and composer is on full display, and when combined with the intensity of experience, the resulting album is a remarkable work of art.
"Jules Reidy is another musician transforming the capabilities of an instrument, in this case the guitar -- somewhere between Vini Reilly, Glenn Branca and Kevin Shields." --The Guardian
"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." --Pitchfork
"Like looking through a tinted window then trying to adjust to the world's normal colours. It's brilliant." --The Quietus
"[Their] music offers an intricate sonic tapestry of fingerstyle guitar, found sounds and spectral electronic drone." -- Crack
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LP
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THRILL 618X-LP
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LP version. Red color vinyl. "Jules Reidy's sublime music maps the human experience in glittering constellations of sound. The guitarist is a driver of Berlin's fertile contemporary music scene. A wide-eyed imagination combined with technical mastery guide each work in Reidy's extensive catalog, from solo guitar albums and collaborations with innovative peers, including recent works with claire rousay, Oren Ambarchi, Andrea Belfi, and Sam Dunscombe to major commissions from JACK Quartet and Zinc & Copper. The songs of Ghost/Spirit collectively convey an astral sense of yearning and wonder, pushing towards transcendence. The album charts a deeply personal journey with love, spirituality and transformation expressed in fractal guitar figures, ethereal vocal vapors and rippling microtones. Reidy's guitar approach unlocks the tonal and textural possibilities of the instrument from their use of alternate tunings and astute processing. The maximalist melodics of album opener 'Every Day There's a Sunset' are bolstered by rumbling bass samples from Andreas Dzialocha, Reidy's collaborator in the duo Sun Kit. On 'Satellite,' cello samples from Judith Hamann stretch out through the cosmos, orbited by spiraling finger-picked guitars, while stacked trombone chords echo out into the ether. Thundering drum samples from Berlin metal mainstay Sara Neidorf push the album to ecstatic peaks on 'Every Day There's a Sunrise,' fragmented rhythms breaking apart in the atmosphere. Field recordings of the Berlin S-Bahn recur throughout the album, another endless cycle of leaving and returning that shuttles beneath the album's whirling tones. Ghost/Spirit captures the inherent power and agency in choosing to offer yourself up to the universe and let go, ego death and prayer rendered in incandescent sonics. Reidy's inimitable skill as a guitarist, producer and composer is on full display, and when combined with the intensity of experience, the resulting album is a remarkable work of art.
"Jules Reidy is another musician transforming the capabilities of an instrument, in this case the guitar -- somewhere between Vini Reilly, Glenn Branca and Kevin Shields." --The Guardian
"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." --Pitchfork
"Like looking through a tinted window then trying to adjust to the world's normal colours. It's brilliant." --The Quietus
"[Their] music offers an intricate sonic tapestry of fingerstyle guitar, found sounds and spectral electronic drone." -- Crack
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LP
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SHELTER 147LP
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LP version. Trances, Jules Reidy's follow-up to the celebrated World in World (2022), takes place in between states, tracing a kind of restless movement in search of -- or is it away from? -- a center. The twelve tracks shift between fragment and epic, returning to familiar phrases between forays outward into uncertain expanses. Through its exploration of the cyclical movements of grief and emotional turbulence, Trances produces a sonic world as raw, absorbing, and surprising as anything Reidy has created to date. Trances' primary instrument is a custom hexaphonic electric guitar tuned in just intonation. Reidy's combination of fingerpicked phrases, open strums, and corrugated processing push on the grammar of guitar-driven experimentalism, locating expressive heft in open-ended harmonics and the odd angles formed by overlapping elements. Chords are slowed and stretched as if to examine their resonance, then overtaken by subterranean motion. The effect is that of oceanic depth, but the rippling that passes between the compositions' sedimentary layers often takes on a metallic edge. The addition of synthesizers, sampled 12-string guitar, field recordings, and half-submerged autotuned voice further denaturalize the compositions. Reidy's vocal interjections -- their particular linguistic content rendered inaccessible -- are based on counting and self-observational techniques for bringing oneself back into the present; at times Reidy's picking also assumes a mantra-like quality, though ultimately the flow of the composition subsumes both. There is a heavy sense of the strange throughout these songs, which bleed at their edges into a continuous, questioning whole. That Reidy's compositions here have a tendency to engulf the listener, like a wave or a squall, can be variously comforting and disorienting.
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