Jules Reidy makes intimate songs fraught with dissonance and tension. They sing through Auto-Tune, digitally mapping their gentle voice onto the familiar intervals of equal temperament, while their customized electric guitar plays in just intonation. The instrument’s frets are scattered around its neck in bits, like holes in an antique computer’s punch card, and its nonstandard tuning means that two not-quite-equivalent scales overlap disruptively in this music, creating rippling interference patterns. Reidy’s lush, disorienting songs also juxtapose serene melodies with unpredictable and often unmetered rhythms—stumbling collages of twinkling electronics, crumpling unpitched concussions, pixelated scribbles that sound like modem handshakes—so that the listener can find no firm ground, either in pitch or in time.
On the new Ghost/Spirit (Thrill Jockey), the Berlin-based guitarist’s playing sometimes seems to belong to a recognizable genre, with cycling arpeggiated patterns a la John Fahey, but at other times it’s pointillistic, minimal, and cryptic. (This seems to depend largely on whether they’re using a 12-string acoustic or their custom microtonal electric.) Reidy has equipped their microtonal guitar with a hexaphonic pickup system that allows each string to be processed as a separate output, and on Ghost/Spirit every note from that instrument seems to gleam from a different point in space. The effect is as immersive as it is strange—it’s as though you’re sitting in a tree draped with fairy lights next to a sentimental cyborg who’s singing just to you.
Reidy’s previous song-based album, 2022’s World in World, centers their guitar, but on Ghost/Spirit they’ve pushed their voice further forward in the mix and added a kaleidoscope of samples, synth tones, and other electronics—including bowed strings, pattering xylophone, clustered trombones, reedy accordion, and tumbling throbs of percussion. (Some of the samples come from Reidy’s friends and collaborators—bassist Andreas Dzialocha, cellist Judith Hamann, sound artist Weston Olencki, drummers Morten Joh and Sara Neidorf—but good luck figuring out which.) Even when the vocal melody moves along with synth chords or drones that reinforce its position as the backbone of the song, Reidy might still drop in sudden blurts of bass, untethered ribbons of feedback, or stochastic flourishes of hi-hat that prevent the music from settling into a single frame. When one element is steady, another will be unstable, and when one is harmonious, another will be wildly discordant—and elements switch roles from song to song.
Reidy’s lyrics on Ghost/Spirit address the ego death of love, whether divine or earthly. The surrender, transformation, and transcendence that accompany such an experience find their mirror in the songs, which suspend the listener between states of being in a kind of ecstatic liminality that could resolve itself in any direction. As Reidy sings on “Spirit”: “All I have for you / All the love and fear / Too close they overlap / Too loud for me to hear.” In a live setting, Reidy runs their voice and guitar through a laptop, a 14-channel mixer, and several effects pedals, including a looper. They augment those inputs with an eight-pad electronic percussion trigger, played with a drumstick in their pick hand. Close your eyes, though, and you can see the prismatic multitudes of Ghost/Spirit hanging in the air.
Jules Reidy Kari Watson opens. Sun 3/30, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $20, 18+
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