'brace, brace' is Julia Reidy’s soaring Slip return: a dread-tinged incantation unfurling from breath-down-the-neck field recordings, auto-murmured voice, synthetic hum, and irrepressible guitar kinetics.
Reidy's signature 12-string playing - precise, burrowing, rhapsodic - dominates the LP's outer cuts, framing a plaintive electric centre. Blooms of arpeggiations and desolate strums re-inflect slow-moving pitch sequences; the music feels at once on fire and graceful, inevitable.
Perhaps most surprising is how organic 'brace, brace'’s expanded palette feels. Reidy's electronics are subtly eerie extensions, alien resonances of her playing, both embedding her instrument and making it somehow unreal. This strange smear of body and apparition is neatly nailed in Reidy's sung-to-herself vocals, coaxed out and encroached upon by autotune.
Succeeding issues of her work by Feeding Tube and Room 40's A Guide To Saints, 'brace, brace' is a definitive statement from a blazing, restless talent.
The LP tours with visuals from Suze Whaites. Whaites' projection environment is built from the coruscant light sources and surface reflections with which her video footage is made, creating mutable vistas at once microscopic and panoramic, domestic and sublime.
'brace, brace' [SLP046] is available on vinyl LP and download from February 2019. Mixed and recorded by Sam Slater. Mastered by Joe Talia. Artwork by Suze Whaites. Distributed by Boomkat.
*NOTE* bonus track 'one way mirror' is included on the download only, not featured on the vinyl.
credits
released February 21, 2019
Music by Julia Reidy
Artwork by Suze Whaites
Recorded and Mixed by Sam Slater in Berlin
Mastered by Joe Talia at Good Mixture Studios in Tokyo
A collection of tracks from the singer and multi-disciplinary artist's 111 collaboration series, featuring KMRU, Laraaji, and others. Bandcamp New & Notable Apr 25, 2024
Eerie, expansive, and breathtaking. This is ambient drone on an epic scale. The effect that some of these pieces have when they abruptly end is shattering -- these sounds become a part of your consciousness, and when they drop away, you're left in silence more intense than you've ever felt. Steven Moses