(2022) Julia Reidy - World in World  


Review:
At the start of Julia Reidy’s new album, World in World, the Australia-born, Berlin-based multi-instrumentalist and producer makes brief sweeps across their electric guitar strings, each note pinging against the next at uncanny angles, like alien electrons bouncing through the thermosphere. Just as the sound of an orchestra tuning reassures an audience of quality control, Reidy’s strums and plucks offer warranties of intrigue, a promise you’ve rarely heard a guitar sound quite like this. Pedals click on and off, their pops framing an incidental rhythm as their electronic purrs unspool and recede. Reidy repeats this ostensible warmup — prismatic notes, pedal pops, droning tones — until you barely notice you’ve slipped into the opening title track. Warped chords and distant vocals shape a meditative hymn, as if bent by funhouse mirrors; you may soon hum along, even if the sound is unfamiliar. Reidy’s recent work, especially 2020’s spellbinding Vanish, used the guitar as a springboard for immersive and audacious art-pop universes, like Julia Holter facing dioramic canvases. But for these nine subtle and intimate pieces, they stick largely to pensive guitar ruminations, with electronics emphasizing certain phrases and Reidy’s spectral voice seeming to haunt others. World in World is a solo guitar album in the way that, say, William Tyler’s Behold the Spirit is a solo guitar album, Mary Lattimore’s Hundreds of Days is a solo harp album, or Nils Frahm’s Spaces is a solo keyboard album. The guitar is Reid’s entryway into wider explorations of sound on a path toward emotionally expressive idiosyncrasy. For World in World, Reidy played a custom guitar built by innovative instrument designer and engineer Sukandar Kartadinata, whose prior projects have included a “data violin” and ways of better incorporating digital software in analogue instruments. Reidy’s request, though, was incredibly hands-on: an electric guitar with moveable frets and “fretlets,” to allow for a wide range of very exact tunings. Reidy wanted to play in just intonation, meaning that the ratio between the notes are whole numbers, rather than the irrational divisions of equal temperament, the reigning system in Western composition. For Reidy’s purposes, the justly tuned guitar reorients familiar picking-or-strumming patterns until you feel like you’re hearing them for the first time. Reidy capitalizes on this sense of newness, making blues and ballads sound novel. Talk of just intonation can sometimes be proudly academic, the details of specific systems acting like theoretical moats. But Reidy operates more on intuition than ideologic devotion in tuning. “I try to treat it as a tool,” Reidy said in an email, “but I’m not precious about logic or precision.… I like establishing systems and then fucking with them.” You may hear the lugubrious syncopation of John Fahey in “World in World” or perhaps the Delta blues during the spectacular and spry “Loom.” These unusual and personal tunings, though, delightfully dodge easy interpretation. Reidy’s every move shimmers in peculiar ways, so even ordinary guitar gestures become mutated and strange. These songs often communicate the sensation of being on an edge you’re trying to get off, or of trying to calm nerves by first acknowledging them. Reidy begins the standout “Walls and Clearings,” for instance, with ululations that invoke a more forthright Grouper. They circle around those moans with broken scales and long, lurid tones until it all coils into a wail, an attempt to push some unnamed pain. The song fades in waves of beautiful fluorescence, triumphant. There are simple delights here, too, tracks that suggest a new avenue of approachability for just intonation. “Paradise in Unrecognisable Colors” is gorgeous, a piece of pastoral wonder that has the grounding effect of Vashti Bunyan’s folk songs or Harold Budd’s piano meditations. Harmonics chime through open space while warbling drones arc beneath them, occasionally rising to commingle; it feels like watching a rainbow emerge from a thunderstorm to crown some verdant expanse. “Ajar” is giddy with expectation, little tufts of bright notes spiraling over Reidy’s murmured vocals and gnarled chords. Again, it’s like finding promise at the edge of calamity. During a 2016 conversation about influences and development, an interviewer asked Reidy about the pleasures and limitations of guitar strings. “Main limitations of the strings? They break,” Reidy quipped. It is galvanizing to hear Reidy, not yet 30, tackle solo guitar improvisation and just intonation together—two modes often wrongly criticized as stodgy or antiquated—with such play and gusto. Where just intonation has frequently been seen as the territory of scholars or outlier eccentrics, solo guitar has been dominated by white dudes. But Reidy made this accessible and eccentric gem at home in Berlin, a DIY expression of just intonation’s possibilities that puts them in league with a growing international crew of fellow young apostles like Kali Malone and Duane Pitre. On World in World, Reidy is offering the familiar thoughts of anxiety, despair, and twinkling hope in a singular dialect, all their own.


         


Track List:
01 - World in World
02 - Poised
03 - Holding Onto
04 - Loom
05 - Ajar
06 - Walls and Clearings
07 - Slipstream
08 - Paradise in Unrecognisable Colours
09 - Hollowed


Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk, experimental
Country: Berlin, Germany
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits


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