Ghost/Spirit by Jules Reidy

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 respected polymath whose prolific output and worldwide touring has led to performances and collaborations with myriad lauded artists. Reidy’s breathtaking recordings and magnetic performances offer a truly futuristic, singular vision of guitar music. Explorations of microtonal mysticism and alternate tunings drawn from transcendental folk and minimalism color Reidy’s playful experiments with smudged pop melodics and sampling. 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 institutions such as 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.

Ghost/Spirit was conceived during a period of dissolution and transformation for Reidy. After experiencing a major shift in their personal identity and a rediscovery of their fascination with mysticism, the album documents a major shift in Reidy’s understanding and experience of earthly and divine love. “My personal experience with mysticism is intuitive, and expresses itself mostly through music. I understand and experience practice as being a struggle and expression of my relation to life’s display and as a tool for transcending it,” they explain. Each track charts a single trepidatious step on the path to being remade, a prayer to the universe delivered with raw honesty. “To Breathe Lighting” takes its title from Anne Carson’s The Glass Essay on heartbreak and eternity, grappling with the tension between earthly and divine love as Reidy’s lyrics trace being “drawn to the sky” and “drawn to the earth” respectively. “Every Day There’s a Sunrise” finds peace and resolution in letting go of our traditional understanding of love, instead accessing a more all-encompassing, astral love directed outwardly at the universe rather than an individual. The album’s title and narrative arc equally communicates this same journey towards transcendence, with the A-side “Ghost” invoking feelings of loss and absence, while the B-side “Spirit” stretches out to encompass something altogether more divine and expansive in its glistening harmonics and lysergic reverb tails.

The experience of transformation and reconstruction is mirrored in Reidy’s compositional approach on Ghost/Spirit. Throughout the album, the guitarist’s refracting guitar themes and vocals are augmented by samples provided by friends and collaborators, deconstructed and reassembled by Reidy into beguiling new forms. 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 new 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’s song trajectory mirrors Reidy’s own personal journey with transformation. As Reidy describes it “The album is infused with this energy of being absolutely destroyed, and having the potential to be remade.” It 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.

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