CLERESTORY, Jules Reidy's New Album, to Arrive via Thrill Jockey

Australian-born, Berlin-based artist Jules Reidy has shared a new single, Clerestory Windows V, the closing track from a forthcoming album titled CLERESTORY, set for release via Thrill Jockey. The record was realized in collaboration with New York's JACK Quartet, an ensemble known for its work in microtonality and just intonation.

Clerestory unfolds across two complementary sides. Following the lead preview 'Shadow Symmetric,' a single edit of the side-long composition, Reidy now returns with 'Clerestory Windows V,' the closing movement of a five-part suite that reimagines 'Shadow Symmetric' as a series of solo electronic and guitar pieces.

Performed by Reidy on hex electric guitar, the piece distills material from the larger composition into its most elemental form. Built from Euclidean sequencing and pitch-shifted single guitar tones, it 'ends with the simplest and most reduced iteration of the piece,' Reidy explains, 'and trails off into two oscillating sine tones: the piece's fundamental and its shadow.'

'Shadow Symmetric' uses two pitch sets that begin from the same point but expand via different scaling into what Reidy calls 'two offset spectral layers'—close but not identical, producing an uncanny near-unison across the quartet's four voices. 'Clerestory Windows,' meanwhile, remakes that same material as a series of episodes, as if seen through individual panes of stained glass, moving through MIDI strings and voices, lyrical 12-string guitar, frozen string tones, and flickering RMI arpeggios before resolving into spacious electric guitar chords shadowed by ringing sine tones.

Clerestory is the latest expression of a musical language Reidy has spent years refining. They have established themself as a singular voice for the guitar, with acclaimed solo albums including Trances (Shelter Press) and their Thrill Jockey debut Ghost/Spirit, while becoming a key figure in Berlin's contemporary music scene through collaborations with Judith Hamann, Sam Dunscombe, David Grubbs, Jan St. Werner, and Oren Ambarchi's various large ensembles.

Like all of Reidy's music, Clerestory is no mere formal exercise, but a meditation on fundamental dynamics of human experience: orientation and disorientation, the hazy borders between the material and the spiritual, and the instability of identity.

CLERESTORY follows Reidy's Thrill Jockey debut Ghost/Spirit and the solo album Trances, released via Shelter Press, continuing a body of work shaped by collaborations with musicians including Judith Hamann, Sam Dunscombe, David Grubbs, and Jan St. Werner.

Photo Credit: David Walker

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