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LP
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BT 088LP
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2023 repress. Black Truffle announce World in World, the latest solo offering from prolific Berlin-based guitarist-composer Julia Reidy. Where the recent trilogy of LP releases -- brace, brace (Slip, 2019), In Real Life (BT 051LP, 2019), and Vanish (EMEGO 288LP, 2020) -- focused on increasingly lush electronic settings for Reidy's propulsive fingerpicking and auto-tuned vocals, arranged into wide-ranging side-long epics, World in World finds Reidy refocusing on the core elements of their approach while simultaneously pushing into challenging new areas. Comprising nine pieces ranging between two and seven minutes in length, the album's opening title track promptly introduces the distinctive palette of just-intoned electric guitars, subtle electronic processing, and voice that is rigorously explored throughout. Where much of Reidy's guitar work on previous recordings explored rapidly pulsed cycling figures, here, notes often hang in the air in a more spacious, lyrical fashion. The elasticity of rhythm and non-linear repetition of pitches initially suggests improvisation until the listener becomes aware of the precise arrangements of spatialized lines. At times, World in World suggests classic bedroom electric guitar works of the 1990s such as Loren Connors's Airs (2015) or Roy Montgomery's Scenes from the South Island (1995); like those works, Reidy's possesses a wonderfully live ambience, with frequent pedal clicks adding to the music's powerful sense of intimacy. In Reidy's case, however, the yearning, melancholic mood of Connors or Montgomery is tempered by the unorthodox guitar tuning, which at points produces a unique and uncomfortable effect somewhere between the hyper-precision of Harry Partch or Lou Harrison and Jandek's slack-stringed descent into the void. While World in World plots out its terrain with a bold single-mindedness that allows some pieces to appear almost as variations on a common theme, subtle changes in emphasis distinguish each track. Tactile percussive interjections skitter across the tremolo tones of "Paradise in Unrecognisable Colours", while "Ajar" ramps up the role played by the electronics, with glitching pitch-shifted and back-masked textures threaded through the guitars and thickly harmonized vocal layers. Ranging from autotuned melodic lines to buried murmurs, Reidy's voice is a frequent presence throughout these nine pieces, at times creating the impression that a more conventional series of songs lurks underneath the chiming microtonal guitars. On the stunning "Poised", whispers and distant, ghostly wails surround the layers of guitars, at times suggesting the foggiest outer reaches of Liz Harris's Grouper. Both rigorously experimental and emotive, World in World is undoubtedly Julia Reidy's finest work yet.
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LP
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EMEGO 288LP
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Vanish is Julia Reidy's yearning, fat debut for Editions Mego. Since 2019, Julia's bubbling 12-string guitar work -- sighing streams of crystal plucks drawn closer or echoing on -- has moored a tactile, ever-lusher sound. On "Guitar", the Australian, Berlin-based musician melts down sharp synths; electric fuzz and flex; uncanny found sounds; and autotuned voice and harmonica in a heady, overpowering potion. Reidy's music sweeps you up. It's restless, always traveling on. Lonesome tones into machine chorales into hesitant hum. The LP's side-long cuts sway between scenes but are always rooted: Julia's guitar and vocal lines seem mapped to the natural ebb-and-flow of breath and thought, they lull you as they push through vast and secret spaces. Vanish completes a trio of releases begun with last year's brace, brace (Slip, 2019) and In Real Life (BT 051LP). The delicious unease, the anxious burning of the preceding volumes has settled, becoming more wide-eyed and resolute. For all its poise, the album's sense of build -- electric licks rasping into glistening synths, punctured by distant kicks -- feels freshest. When "Oh Boy"'s smudged whistle comes, it has fought its way out of the thickets, and hits like heartbreak. Music by Julia Reidy. Mixed and mastered by Joe Talia at Holding Pattern Berlin, June 2020. Artwork by Suze Whaites. Layout by Nik Void. Impossible without: Suze Whaites, Adam Pultz Melbye, Manuel Pessoa de Lima, David Walker.
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LP
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BT 051LP
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2024 repress. Black Truffle present In Real Life, the latest in a flurry of releases from Berlin-based guitarist and composer Julia Reidy. Having drawn acclaim for solo performances on 12-string acoustic guitar that bridge microtonality, "American primitive" stylings, and classic minimalism, Reidy's recent releases have utilized an increasingly broad sonic palette, fleshing out guitar-based composition with electronics, field recordings, and -- most strikingly -- heavily auto-tuned vocals. On In Real Life, Reidy pushes one step further, crafting an epic LP-length suite that moves from abstracted song to lush electronics and explorations in contemporary musique concrete. Beginning with a passage of eerie electronics and creaking percussive interjections, Reidy's heavily auto-tuned voice quickly takes center stage. Surrounded by explosions of electric guitar and synthesized arpeggios, the auto-tuned voice delivers a melancholic ode, bringing together poetic images to reflect on the instability of experience and mutability of identity in a contemporary world saturated by digital technology. This concern with the unsettled relationship between the physical and digital is reflected musically by the constantly shifts in emphasis between Reidy's physically demanding guitar-picking and the various forms of synthesis deployed. Similarly, the dynamic imagery of cutting, shattering, and "racing streams" present in Reidy's lyrics also serves to characterize the structure of In Real Life, which ceaselessly shifts between distinct episodes. The song-based opening, long sequences of frenetic 12-string guitar shadowed and eventually overtaken by synth tones, passages of delicate chiming harmonics, electro-acoustic cut-ups -- each flows seamlessly into the next, often recurring throughout the record's duration, which lingers over interstitial moments between these episodes. Artwork by Suze Whaites; LP design by Lasse Marhaug. Mixed and mastered by Joe Talia at Good Mixture, Tokyo. Vinyl cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
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LP
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SLP 046LP
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Brace, Brace is Julia Reidy's spellbinding return to Slip, rendering a shimmering, introspective solo dialog on 12-string guitar laced with soaring but unsettling vocal processes and spectral electronics. With an uncanny, even unsettling ability to hold her listener's ear-gaze, Julia's follow-up to 2017's Dawning On finds the Berlin-based Aussie continuing to recontextualize her instrument with elegant precision to yield a sublime tension between her heavy-lidded vocals and iridescent strings. In Julia's remarkable opener "Of Neither", strings fluidly cascade from her fingertips into an amniotic soundsphere of field recordings and gently fleeting synth figures. When combined with the deep dreaming AI texture of her autotuned vocals and wind-blown harmonica, the effect recalls a sort of midnight Tuareg blues half-remembered from a fevered sleep. It's deeply beautiful stuff, periodically fading into and out of the light, only to return with more intense inflection and density, yet ever-more spaced out, leading to the internal pocket of "Lament" and its achingly coaxed secrets. With recipients suitably defocused and in pliable state, Julia takes the whole other side to play on that line between organic and processed material, slipping from noirish, filmic intrigue into the middle distance where her rustic coruscations twirl in a set dance with their spectral reflections. RIYL: John Fahey, Hope Sandoval, Talk Talk, Yoshi Wada, Jim O'Rourke. Edition of 300.
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LP
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FTR 338LP
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"Recently we touched base with the New Zealand ex-pat guitarist Dean Roberts. He's living in Berlin these days, teaching, playing and staying out late. When asked if there were any interesting, unheralded players we should know about he immediately mentioned Julia Reidy. Julia is also a guitarist currently based in Berlin, but the city from which she's apart is Sydney, NSW. While there she was embroiled in the Australian improv scene, and played with the likes of Jon Rose et al. She was focused exclusively on electric guitar back in those days. Since relocating to Europe she has split her concentrations between electric and acoustic, playing in two duos -- Tennis of All Kinds (with bassist Adam Pultz Melbye) and PALES (with percussionist Samuel Hall) -- among other settings. On All Is Ablaze Ms. Reidy plays both an acoustic 12 string and an electric, both of which sound unusually raw and exciting in her hands. Each side of the record consists of a single piece, the A is 'All Is Ablaze,' the flip, 'Thatched Steel & Rain.' In his notes, Dean writes about the beautiful contrasts of the music's textures, drawing apt comparisons to everyone from Robbie Basho to Tom Cora. As these namechecks might suggest, Julia's first LP embraces a nearly unknowable field of sonic detailing. Her technique can sound precise and smudgy at almost the same moment. The intent of her journey seeming to shift with her breathing patterns. There is an organic depth and weight to the music here, displaying an exceptionally wide breadth of influence, knowledge, chops and imagination. We would like to thank Mr. Roberts for introducing us to the music of Julia Reidy. You will soon be doing the same." --Byron Coley, 2017 Edition of 300.
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